Unfinished fic for the record: Rubeus Hagrid and the Eagle of the Ninth

[dolorous_ett]

It seems a bit strange to be putting up fic that was 1) jossed very effictively by the real book and 2) as a result completely unfinishable - but I ran across a little cache of fanfic files and decided that it would be a good thing to archive things like this on LJ, just in case I have another Ghastly Accident with my computer, like the time I poured white wine into my laptop 3 days before a deadline...

So, here's all there will ever be of Rubeus Hagrid and the Eagle of the Ninth. Read or not, as you will. 

 

Three weeks had passed since Rubeus Hagrid had brought Harry Potter from St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies in London to the old shepherd’s hut in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, and already both were close to the end of their tethers. It was late October, the War had been over for three months and the nights were drawing in.

It had all seemed such a good idea at the time, Rubeus reflected sombrely as he gazed out of the window into the gathering dark. Neither were fit for a return to normal life just yet (Harry had lost his scar in the Final Battle, and with it much of his old magical powers and some of his memories; Rubeus’s left leg had been amputated at the knee); they had been unusually close since Harry first came to Hogwarts and Albus Dumbledore had left Goatsgarth to Rubeus in his will.

Goatsgarth had been home to Rubeus over the summer that should have been the most miserable of his life, for in the course of the last eighteen months he had lost his father, his home, his reputation, his place at Hogwarts School and his right to practice magic. Kindly Professor Dumbledore, the then Transfiguration teacher, had taken fourteen-year-old Rubeus under his wing, without which he might well have starved before he turned fifteen and could be apprenticed to the gamekeeper. Instead, Rubeus had spent a surprisingly light-hearted summer with Professor Dumbledore in his ramshackle little holiday cottage, and their nature rambles, cheery makeshift bachelor meals and earnest conversations deep into the night formed some of Rubeus’s fondest memories. Dumbledore had plainly not forgotten either – with typical astuteness, he had bequeathed this tumbledown old place to the one person who would truly appreciate its significance.

Hagrid had wanted to go straight back from hospital to his work at Hogwarts, leg or no leg. “They need me!” he had protested to Headmaster Flitwick, who was visiting him in St Mungo’s. “Yeh won’ last a day without me! The kiddies need their ol’ Hagrid! And the creatures need me too – pine without me, they will, bless their little hearts.”

Flitwick had fixed him with a beady stare.

“Of course we can manage,” he said. “We need you on your feet, otherwise you’ll be no use to your creatures at all. Beverley Grubbley-Plank is a nice, sensible lady who’s always taken excellent care of your animals, and the children would be most upset to see you looking so frail! You need to concentrate on getting well – and getting some of those qualifications we talked about.”

After Minerva McGonagall’s startling rise to Deputy Minister in the wake of the Final Battle, Filius Flitwick had taken over as Headmaster, and one of his first acts in office was a thorough staff appraisal. Unlike the luckless Binns, Hagrid had held onto his job, but Flitwick had made it very clear to him that to qualify for an assistant professor’s salary rather than a gamekeeper’s he would need at least four OWLs under his belt, and if he ever wanted to be a full Professor or Head of House he really ought to think about sitting a NEWT or two.

Outwardly Headmaster Flitwick was tiny and unassuming, but he had all the tenacity of his Goblin forebears, and when he had made up his mind, nothing was allowed to stand in his way. Within a day, Hagrid’s Ministry ban on magic use had been lifted; a sullen, resentful Olivander dragged to Rubeus’s bedside from who knows where to supply him with a brand-new wand (“Oak and dragon heartstring – twenty inches, give or take – knotty – perfect for the more mature, fuller-figured wizard”) and a harassed-looking Short-Eared Owl, laden with study plans, parchments, quills, scrolls of exercises and textbooks, had made an emergency crash-landing on the foot of his hospital bed.

In his cups Hagrid had been prone to making wild claims along the lines of: “Cut off in me prime, I was – every bit as good as the rest of ‘em, if the blighters’d just give me a chance”. Now his chance had come – and he was terrified.

As he had often done during the long, painful and ultimately fruitless fight to save his leg, Hagrid pulled on his wolfskin dressing gown and propelled his way down the corridor on his crutches to the Spell Damage (Martyrdom) ward, where his dear friend Harry Potter lay unconscious in a private room, victim of the final curse that had stripped the Dark Lord of his life and his power, but at a terrible price for the Boy who Lived. In the six weeks when Hagrid had celebrated, wept, grieved and rejoiced over that hard-earned victory, Harry had lain in a cool, white bed in St Mungo’s, outwardly uninjured but utterly unresponsive, the scar vanished from his head, the bright green eyes that so recalled his mother staring unseeing at the ceiling. Still, Rubeus Hagrid knew from personal experience exactly what hope could achieve in the most hopeless of situations, and so every afternoon (when the pain and grief were strongest) he would sit for half an hour beside the bed of the Boy who Triumphed, clasping his cold hand in his own, talking of his own small concerns and anxieties – for who knew what would prove to be the trigger that would awake him from his slumber?

“Well, ol’ boy,” he said today. “It’s been a strange day and no mistake. Who’d’ve thought old Flitwick’d be such a stickler for rules and bits o’ paper? Here I am, keeper one day, teacher the next – and then comes the war – lose me leg, me old dog dead in the war, hut blown to blazes… and now I’m s’posed to take exams… at my age! I mean, what’s that all about then? Is that what I fought a war for?”

As ever, there was no response. Rubeus looked at the prone body of his friend, and felt a lump forming in his throat, part sorrow for Harry, part desperate frustration and self-pity.

“I dunno, Harry,” he whispered softly. “Was it all worth it? All that fighting… all those good people dead – boys an’ girls I grew up with – kids I taught to groom their first Puffskein – and for what? World’s not exactly full of good folks as it is – and with Dumbledore gone, who’ll stick up for me now if I don’ pass them dratted exams? No spring chicken, one leg gone, out on my ear to start again… what’m I going to do, Harry?”

Rubeus had not wept since the day they took his leg, but now tears were brimming up in his eyes and splashing in damp, salty puddles onto the clean institutional bedsheets and the prone body of his friend. Knowing that Harry was not to be touched or moved, he hid his face in his hands in an attempt to stanch the flow. And so it was that he missed the moment when the Boy who Triumphed opened his eyes – the first he knew of it was when a faint voice said plaintively from the bed: “Can I have a glass of water? I’m so thirsty.”

Rubeus couldn’t remember much after that. They told him later that he had thundered through the corridors of St Mungo’s on his crutches, weeping and laughing like a maniac, yelling “He’s alive! He’s alive!” and it had taken three burly porters and a pint of chloroform to get him back to bed. His only memories after that were the sounds of excited voices and feet rushing up and down the corridor.

The next morning, Harry’s room was so full of doctors that Rubeus could not push his way in. But come the afternoon Harry was sitting up in bed, drinking chicken soup and more than happy to talk. He looked desperately pale and ill, but he was conscious, and beamed at Hagrid as he came in.

“You know, you really mustn’t worry about the OWLs,” he said. “I know you’ll do fine.”

“And you’re goin’ to be fine too – have you and about and out o’ here in no time, they will,” Rubeus replied, and for the first time since his operation felt properly happy.

Sadly, it was not quite that simple. Considering Harry had been on the receiving end a blast of powerful Dark magic that had cost Hermione Granger an eye and Severus Snape his life, frying electronics and blighting crops for miles around, and that he had been lying motionless in bed for a month and a half, gruel Banished directly into the stomach his only source of nourishment, he was not too badly off physically. But no-one had reckoned with the loss of his scar: what had seemed a minor cosmetic change turned out to be far more serious, as Harry had become accustomed to calling on the power of the scar, and without it his innate magical abilities were greatly weakened. Not destroyed, the mediwizards hastened to add, but since he had drawn on this unnatural source of magic from the very beginning of his magical education, casting spells using only his own resources would be no easy task. His old wand was useless, of course, and a silently fuming Ollivander had been dragged out of retirement again to provide him with a replacement (“Mahogany and unicorn tail – firm – nine inches – nice wand for the late starter… do I know you from somewhere, young man?”), and although Harry had immediately attempted to use it, the unexpected drain on his innate magical abilities proved a terrible strain on his already precarious health – the first time he tried to cast a simple Lumos he fainted clean away, and stayed that way for a day and a half.

A week went by. Various doctors inspected Rubeus’s stump and fitted him with a provisional wooden leg (until the Goblins could manufacture a new one for him in their Fires of Doom – a gift of thanks for his part in the defence of Gringotts’), while Harry became steadily more frustrated with his progress, both physically and magically.

The day Rubeus first made it unaided on his wooden leg down the corridor to Spell Damage (Martyrdom), he found Harry pale and shaking, covered in sweat and glaring at a needle which was refusing stubbornly to become a match. Finally he threw his wand onto the floor in frustration, wiping his sweaty forehead with a very shaky hand.

“It’s not fair!” Harry said angrily. “You’re getting better every day, and I’m still stuck here trying to do spells that won’t even work any more after I saved the whole of the Wizarding world! It’s so hard, and nobody understands! And soon you’ll be gone – and I’ll be stuck here all on my own…” his voice shook, and he seemed close to tears.

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere without yeh!” cried Rubeus impulsively.

Hope blossomed on Harry’s face.

“Really?” he said hopefully. “But… no – it’s far too much to ask…” and the light in his eyes died as quickly as it had come.

Rubeus had never been famous for his great intellect or quickness of wit, but he could not bear to see a fellow-creature suffer, and in emergencies his mind was capable of surprising intuitive leaps. The plan came to him in a flash.

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere without yeh,” he said again, more firmly this time. “’Cos we’re goin’ together, you and I. You’ll come along o’ me to Goatsgarth, ol’ Dumbledore’s place up by the Roman Wall, what he left me in his will – used to stay there with him as a boy. I’ll look after you – we’ll look out fer each other – be right as rain in no time!”

“We will?” asked Harry in a hopeful voice.

“We will!” said Rubeus firmly. “Just the two of us – what larks, eh?”

Of course it was not really that simple. The Mediwizards were outraged – leaving the hospital so quickly, before they were properly recovered, no qualified medical supervision – they took Hagrid’s protestation that he’d been doctoring sick animals for years very badly indeed. For a while Rubeus was close to giving up, but he had surprising allies: Molly Weasley, who firmly believed that Home was Best; Flitwick, who felt their minds were not being sufficiently stretched in hospital; McGonagall, who had experienced Rubeus’s tender care first-hand after an accident in her Animagus form with a Fire Crab and a bed of catnip; even Hermione, who, in spite of her wounding indifference to his lessons, had relatives in the medical profession, and harangued anyone who would listen on the Importance of Emotional Involvement in Really First-Rate Nursing.

Within a few weeks the decision was made. Harry and Rubeus packed their meagre belongings, said their goodbyes to the staff of St Mungo’s and were conveyed in a Ministry car straight to Goatsgarth, there to enjoy a relaxing convalescence and breathe the fresh air.

***

At first sight at least, Goatsgarth was much as Rubeus remembered from his teenage years: a rambling, single-storied structure covered in moss, lurking in a hollow just under one of the less frequented stretches of Hadrian’s Wall. It had started out as a two-room goatherd’s hut, to which one of Albus’s ancestors had added a kitchen and another small bedroom at the back, built a few tumbledown outhouses, sheds and byres to form a small courtyard at the front of the property and installed a pump for fresh water. A small, windswept garden at the back, surrounded by a dry stone wall, contained a handful of stunted apple trees, a quantity of shaggy long grass and a privy.

No-one had lived in Goatsgarth for a many years, but the Dumbledore family elf, Quirky, had been sent over for a day to clean and air the place, sweep out the magpies’ nests from the chimneys and put clean sheets on the beds; and Molly Weasley had sent a bowl of nourishing Irish stew to heat up on the kitchen range.

Although the house was legally his, Rubeus insisted that Harry take the master bedroom with its view of courtyard and the hills beyond, partly out of an obscure nostalgia for his old cubby-hole next to the kitchen, partly out of a feeling that Harry, unlike him, was Really Ill and in need of special treatment. Harry cheerfully accepted, and soon his belongings were liberally scattered over the room, and Harry himself safely tucked up in Albus’s old four-poster bed with a warming pan at his feet. Rubeus wandered aimlessly around the kitchen for a while, pottering about and getting used to these once-familiar surroundings, until he suddenly found himself so weary that he needed to rest in the armchair.

When he woke up with a crick in his neck, the fire had gone out, the room was pitch black and the only sound was the tramping of mailed feet as the old Legions went on their rounds. Still, nothing much had changed in the room since he was last in that chair, and he groped his way to his old room without difficulty, rubbing his neck and cursing softly. Still, he reflected as he removed his wooden leg, sank into bed with a groan and pulled the chilly sheets up to his neck, tomorrow was all theirs, and tomorrow was certain to be very different.

***

Tomorrow came sooner than Rubeus had expected. He woke to dazzling gold sunlight pouring in through undrawn curtains, the sound of heavy footsteps tramping up the garden path, and loud, cheerful voices.

Luckily Rubeus had gone to sleep in most of his clothes. He had just time to strap on his wooden leg and tidy his hair with sleep-numbed fingers before they began to hammer on the door. He drew the bolts and opened the door, half expecting in his befuddled state to see “yet another of them ministry do-gooders” full of unwelcome questions about whether the Flobberworms had had their teeth drawn as per Ministry Declaration 3849/24 part xii, and whether he fulfilled all the requirements for a Licensed Unicorn Hunter (but who did these days?). Instead, he saw two stocky red-headed young men in lurid jackets bright with jewelled buttons and gold braid, whose faces cracked into identical evil grins at the sight of Rubeus.

“Well, look who we have here…”

“… Hogwarts’s very own Professor Hagrid…”

“… all rumpled and unshaven…”

“… at half past nine on a fine weekday morning…”

“… trousers on backwards…”

“…been making a night of it, I bet…”

“… shocking at his age!”

The Weasley twins swaggered their way into the little living room, threw themselves onto Albus’s old settle (which made alarming creaking noises but held), threw the bundles and baskets they were carrying to the floor and gave him a triumphant thumbs-up:

“Nice work, mate!” they chorused, beaming.

“Close the door old boy…” one of them added.

“… there’s a terrible draught in here…”

“Were you born in a barn?”

Shaking his head but grinning in spite of himself, Rubeus pulled the door to and walked slowly to his old armchair, where he collapsed with a grunt.

“An’ what about you then?” he asked. “What’s keeping you from work on such a fine morning?”

The twins looked at each other, beaming.

“Bendy time!” they chorused.

“It’s a Muggle thing.”

“Hermione told us all about it.”

“It means we only have to go to work when we want to…”

“Brilliant thinkers, those Muggles!”

Their broad grins were infectious: Rubeus felt a smile spreading over his own face.

“Well, I ain’t complaining,” he said. “So tell me, boys – what can I do for you?”

The twin on the left made an expansive gesture that caused the rubies on his cuffs to flash in the sunlight.

“Ask rather, what we can do for you!”

“Word on the street is old Flitwick’s sending you back to school…”

“… ah, school…”

“… how we remember it…”

“… the agony, the drudgery…”

“… the homework…”

“… so we wondered…”

“… if you’d care to sample some of our new, improved prototype Skiving Snackboxes…”

“… at a special rate for family friends, naturally…”

“… Nosebleed Nougat…”

“… Fainting Fancies…”

“… Post-traumatic Pontefract Cakes…”

It took Rubeus a few seconds to react. His head was swimming and his wound was throbbing dully. He had never felt less in need of Post-traumatic Pontefract Cakes in his life.

The twin on the right with the expensive orchid buttonhole (probably George) gave him an odd look.

“Hagrid, mate,” he said, “you OK?”

Rubeus pulled himself together hurriedly.

“Oh… fine, fine,” he said vaguely. “Get you a cuppa tea, lads?” he added, steeling himself for the struggle to get out of the armchair.

Fred gave him a long look.

“No call for that, mate,” he said. “Now it’s true that we came out here for a breath of fresh air…”

“Fleur’s baby’s due in a fortnight, you see…”

“… and she and Mum are busy exchanging experiences…” The twins exchanged a glance and shuddered.

“… in between preparing goodies for Harry and you, of course…”

“… here’s lettuce and radishes from the garden…”

“… plums and apples from the orchard…”

“… a loaf of white bread and a nutty brown…”

“… butter to go with, a pot of damson jam…”

“… a ginger cake, a plum cake, a lemon drizzle cake…”

“… one of Cousin Wallace’s special cheeses…”

“… milk from Great-Uncle Aberforth’s dairy…”

“… eggs from our own hens…”

“… and the chicken they came out of – roasted of course…”

“… and a Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes party bag for Harry!”

By now Rubeus was so laden with parcels, pots and baskets that he could barely see his visitors over the top. Fred (or possibly George) reached over the food mountain and patted him on the head.

“Now you just sit there like a good boy and count your winnings… we’ll deal with the tea.”

Which they did in their own inimitable style, judging by the crashes, thuds, splintering, minor explosions, muttered confabulations and hasty incantations from the kitchen. Rubeus thought wistfully of the dear old platters and mugs of his long-gone holiday – true, he would be learning Mending Charms himself soon enough, but somehow the results were never quite the same as the original.

Still, the tea when it came was good and strong – at least Molly Weasley had instilled a proper understanding of warming the pot, plenty of tea leaves and copious amounts of sugar. The twins rattled cheerfully away, gulping their tea at a rate that would have left anyone else with second-degree burns, happy to hold their own conversation while Rubeus drifted away on memories of a childhood that seemed further away than it had ever been.

“Well, better be going,” one of the twins said at last.

“Those Dungbombs won’t pack themselves into oven cleaner bottles, will they now?”

“Can’t wait till we see Mum’s face!”

“Cheeribye!”

And with that they were gone, slamming the door behind them.

***

This time Rubeus had time to pull up the tatty old footstool (embroidered by Albus’s late Aunt Bevelina with tiny pictures of frisky goats cavorting in fields of poppies and hemp) before the doorbell rang again.

By eleven o’clock that morning they had had visits from Remus Lupin with stomach-churning stories of life among the werewolves; Dobby the free house-elf wanting to know if Harry Potter had enough socks (gave Rubeus the creeps – he knew all about house-elves and they definitely weren’t supposed to behave like that); Ernie McMillan collecting for the Severus Snape Memorial Trophy for Good Fellowship; Erasmus Lovegood from the Quibbler with a pack of his own special herb tea and a nosegay of dandelions from his daughter; Vincent Crabbe with a home-made get-well card and an owl with a broken wing; a tearful Ginny Weasley full of questions about whether Harry was “serious” and what he was “going through”, though strangely she did not feel able to go through and ask Harry any of those things in person (Rubeus was pretty sure Harry was awake by this time); and finally Hermione Granger with Kribbem & Prosper’s latest OWL and NEWT pass notes, hot off the press (by now  Harry was certainly awake, just hiding, Rubeus would have taken his oath on it).

***

Once Hermione had gone, he finally had time to turn his attention to his mug of tea, now stone cold, but he was thirsty enough after all that talking not to care. He put some more logs on the fire, leaned back in his armchair and prepared to take a swig when he noticed that Harry’s door had swung open, and Harry, pale and rumpled, was leaning in the doorway.

“Hi, Hagrid,” he said. “Did you sleep all right? Have we had visitors? Why didn’t you wake me? What’s for lunch?”

Comments

[white_hart]

I am sorry there's not going to be any more of this, because what there is is fantastic!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I was very keen on it when I started writing it... but the way JKR wrote it, I just don't think Harry would have been left to his own devices like that if badly hurt - or behave badly enough for the story to work. And he got to keep his scar. Also, it never occurred to me that Grawp would survive.

The story could have survived any one of thsoe three problems - but not all of them!

A pity, because I did rather like the idea of Hagrid roaming the Wall in search of the eagle with a big butterfly net and a bag of Owl Treats!

I hope you're feeling a bit better today.

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

FINISH IT!!!
THAT'S WHAT AU IS FOR!!!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I did think about it, but it's not far enough AU, if you see what I mean. I like the kind of AUs where Harry is not only a girl called Rose, but also Hagrid's secret daughter, and the Death Eaters are secretly in league with the Boy Scouts, that kind of thing...

Thank you for the kind words, anyway!

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

the Death Eaters are secretly in league with the Boy Scouts
Are you sure that's not canon? Because I thought any evil organization is in league with the Boy Scouts by definition.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Don't let tree_and_leaf catch you saying that!

My aunt refused to join the Girl Guides as a teenager. I think her exact words were "crypto-fascist lesbian organisation". My Mum wouldn't let me near the Brownies either. So my plans to become an Evil Overlord were tragically cut off before they even began...

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

I used to go on archeological excavations. One time, I spent a week doing restauration (i.e. we spent the entire week in the basement of the townhall of where we were, drinking coffee and washing broken pieces of ceramic pots fro the XVIIth century). We were kindly lodged by the local boy scouts and we ended up inventing recipes for how to best cook a boy scout. Also, we saw a wedding where the bride was wearing an ugly burgundy dress and we decided to get gay-married in Denmark, the eight of us at once, all in burgunday dresses. And we sang "Don't Cry for me, Argentina" in Dutch. So, you see, any mention of Boy Scouts triggers my PTSD from that time ;-)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I don't wonder you're traumatised. It's a miracle you can hold your hands steady enough to type. What a holiday that must have been!

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

You have no idea. Years and years of therapy, and still I'm not over it!

[saralinda.livejournal.com]

It's hard to finish a story that becomes AU after you start it, but I really enjoyed this and I would read on if you continued.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I have occasionally thought of rejigging this story with the surviving twin taking Harry's place... but never finishing it as it stands. It would just seem silly somehow.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, you should finish it! I love where you're going with it -- and AUs are perfectly legitimate!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I do like that icon!

Thank you for your kind words, but if it does go any further, it'll probably be hugely refitted to fit in with canon, with will mean that lots of the actualy words can't be the same. The idea of the ghostly legions on the Wall might crop up again one of these days, though.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

I do understand that dilemma. Thankfully most of my unfinished stories either deal with tertiary characters or take place during time periods that canon hasn't touched. Much as I'd love to bring my already-written stories up to speed with current canon, I've accepted that it's pretty much impossible! ;)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't like to see you touching any of your longer works. They're internally consistent, and charming as they are. It would spoil the balance completely!

[tree_and_leaf]

I can understand why you don't feel like going on with something which has been thoroughly jossed, but I'm rather sad about it - I like what you've got here, and the idea of Hagrid and the Eagle of the Ninth is a fantastic one.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Er... I can tell you what happens in the end, if you want?

I've thought about making "Rubeus Hagrid and the Eagle of the Ninth" over with the surviving Weasley twin in Harry's role, but I suspect it would involve a complete rewrite.

Basically, I need to learn to finish stories. I have one good story and one peice of amusing crack that have definite potential... I just need to get on with it.

[zaftig46.livejournal.com]

As usual, this is full of little casual references, and inside jokes, and is far superior to the original (I especially loved Aunt Bevelina's embroidery, LOL). I'm sad you won't continue, because I think it's a great idea, and I want to know what the Eagle of the Ninth is all about!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Thank you for spotting Aunt Bevelina's embroidery! I'm convinced that whatever makes the Dumbledores what they are is hereditary...

(And I could tell you what happens in the end, if you're interested?)