Quite a few people had been keeping a fairly close eye on the twice-weekly N.E.W.T.-level Physical Education class since news of its existence had first spread through the school.
But over lunch, once word properly got around from the small handful of students who'd actually attended the first session, everyone else was sorely disappointed to learn that the advanced-level class had gone straight back to dense textbook work instead of the practical fireworks they'd all been imagining.
Harry and Neville were both firmly among the disappointed, having heard the rumours secondhand and let their expectations run considerably ahead of the reality.
Most people had been hoping, that Professor Watson would keep pulling out one fascinating practical exercise after another for his advanced students—something that let them feel their own progress directly and viscerally, rather than sitting quietly at a desk scribbling structural formulas across a growing pile of parchment.
Hermione, on the other hand, was rather looking forward to it. Compared to all the hands-on, physically demanding training the class had built its reputation on, careful structural analysis was precisely the kind of intellectual exercise she actually excelled at without reservation.
Aside from that minor disappointment rippling through the school, there was only one other thing genuinely worth looking forward to this particular week.
The academic exchange delegation, due to formally arrive at Hogwarts.
The opening feast hadn't given many concrete specifics about who exactly the delegation would comprise. But for one reason or another—word of exactly who made up this visiting group had already leaked out and spread steadily through every House by the middle of the week.
Most people found the whole prospect rather exciting. Not everyone agreed with that assessment, however.
"I absolutely refuse to sit and eat a meal with those beasts. They'll maul me the second my back's turned!"
"Too right, Talia. Unless they chain them up properly first, obviously. Can you honestly imagine sitting there trying to have your dinner with some twenty-foot brute reeking to high heaven right next to you the whole time—"
One evening, while Ron and Hermione were out together on their scheduled patrol of the castle corridors, they overheard two first-year Slytherins saying exactly that—and the pair of them were promptly sent scurrying back toward their common room by a suddenly and thoroughly furious Hermione with her lecture following them the entire retreat.
Turning back around afterward, still faintly flushed from the confrontation, Hermione found Ron standing beneath the enormous, glittering House Points hourglasses in the entrance hall, apparently lost in his own thoughts.
"What's wrong?"
Hermione's eyebrows shot up at his expression.
"Don't tell me you actually think those two had a point?"
"Giants are bigger than trolls, though, aren't they?"
Ron hesitated for a moment, then shrugged, his discomfort was visible.
"It's not that I can't handle sharing a room with house-elves, or hags, or whatever else is on the list. But giants… the sheer amount of damage they're capable of doing is terrifying, Hermione. Just look at the state of Diagon Alley right now—half of that destruction is down to them, from what everyone's said about the battle."
Hermione's face went red at that.
She didn't especially want to admit it aloud, but she couldn't quite bring herself to fully deny it either—Ron, however reluctantly she felt about conceding the point, did have one.
A naturally short-tempered giant showing up unexpectedly in the Great Hall at Hogwarts really would be a disaster waiting to happen.
"Anyway, I'm quite sure Professor Watson will have some way of keeping everything in line!"
Hermione said huffily, clearly ending the conversation on her own terms, then turned and marched off up the nearest staircase without waiting for a response.
It had to be said, this particular move of Bryan's was an extraordinarily bold one by any reasonable measure.
If it weren't for his own considerable standing and hard-won reputation, the entire wizarding world would probably have been up in vocal, organised protest against the very idea of housing giants and werewolves and vampires inside a school full of children.
Even some of the more senior bureaucrats over at the Ministry hadn't fully understood this particular "heretical" decision when it first came across their desks but they'd chosen to back him regardless, trusting the track record even when the specific logic remained unclear to them.
After all, without the giants' genuine, wholehearted cooperation—how were they meant to properly clean up a wizarding world that Voldemort had thrown badly out of joint on nearly every front?
Diplomacy of exactly this uncomfortable, unprecedented kind was, increasingly, looking like the only viable path forward.
Rather like the atmosphere when the Triwizard Tournament had first begun, all those months ago, and the whole school had gone out together to formally welcome the students of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons.
Classes let out Friday afternoon at their usual hour, and under the careful direction of their respective Heads of House, the students walked out and lined up beneath the marble staircase at the castle's main entrance to wait.
The young witches and wizards chattered away constantly, unable to properly settle into quiet anticipation, and the whole scene had taken on a distinctly chaotic, restless energy.
The professors, for their part, had precious little attention to spare for keeping strict order among the students—they were far too preoccupied with their own private worries about the guests soon to arrive, several of them were exchanging tense, sidelong glances with one another.
"You're sure nothing's going to go wrong tonight, Bryan?"
Professor McGonagall asked in a low, tightly controlled voice, wringing her own hands together in front of her.
"If you're asking me to promise you that absolutely nothing will happen this evening, I'm afraid I can't do that, Minerva—"
Bryan said it plainly.
"But I do genuinely believe everything currently stands well within hand."
Far from putting Professor McGonagall properly at ease, this particular answer only seemed to make her visibly more nervous still, and much the same reaction could be observed rippling through the rest of the staff who'd overheard Bryan's answer.
Professor Vector, notably, had already drawn his wand partway from his robes and looked as though he were quietly bracing himself to duel something at the very first sign of trouble.
It was a cold but clear night, the darkness was settling in steadily around them now that the sun had fully dropped, and a pale, half-translucent moon already hung low above the silhouetted treeline of the Forbidden Forest, casting everything in a thin, silvery light.
Harry, like nearly everyone else assembled on the steps, kept glancing left and right across the darkening grounds, wondering aloud along with his neighbours exactly how the delegation would actually make its appearance—from the sky, perhaps, or across the lake, or simply walking up the long drive from Hogsmeade.
"Maybe the goblins will fly in on some kind of carriage the size of Gringotts!"
Colin Creevey—Harry's devoted admirer, camera as always slung around his neck raised his equipment hopefully, half-joking but clearly ready to capture whatever spectacular arrival occurred.
The hour and minute hands on Harry's own watch lined up on the five as he checked it. He glanced back over his shoulder toward the castle; the candles inside the Great Hall had already been lit.
Thanks to everyone's prior experience with the arrivals of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons the previous year, every set of eyes remained focused expectantly on the Black Lake's dark surface and the open sky above it but the moment the door of the little wooden hut on the edge of the Forbidden Forest swung open instead, Harry noticed the movement at once.
"That's—"
Harry's startled, spontaneous exclamation drew the attention of everyone standing near him, and they all turned simultaneously to follow the direction of his gaze.
"No question about it—one of them's Hagrid—"
Ron stated the obvious, squinting toward the distant, unmistakably large silhouette now emerging from the hut.
"But who's that next to Hagrid? He looks awfully short—I mean, comparatively, obviously, next to Hagrid himself—"
Neville asked, squinting harder in the gathering dark.
Hagrid hadn't, as it turned out, actually come alone; someone was walking, or being coaxed into walking, beside him.
Compared to Hagrid, the second figure was, technically, on the smaller side. But compared to any ordinary witch or wizard standing on those front steps, he made even Crabbe and Goyle look comically unimpressive by comparison.
"Sorry, Professor Dumbledore, Professor Watson!"
From far off across the darkening lawn, Hagrid's booming, carrying voice reached them clearly.
"I've been tryin' ter talk little Grawpy into comin' out fer the last twenty minutes—oh, he's a bit sensitive about crowds, see, never seen this many people at once in his life, so don' go frightenin' him, all right, whatever yeh do!"
Harry, Ron, and Hermione exchanged a rapid round of glances between the three of them, each set of eyes were carrying the exact same expression of pure, rising bewilderment.
Hagrid finally stopped a little over a hundred feet from the crowd—mostly, it appeared, because the hulking figure he had gripped by the wrist simply could not be persuaded to walk any closer.
"Don' be shy now, lad. We talked about this already, remember?"
Hagrid turned back and patted the big-shouldered figure firmly on one massive shoulder, then tugged him along toward the castle again with patient effort.
The students watched, several of them visibly, openly terrified, as "little Grawpy" dug in hard against Hagrid's pulling. His enormous feet had planted themselves into the lawn, and everywhere the two of them passed across the grass, two deep furrows appeared behind them, gouged straight through the turf.
A significant number of students had already started backing away up the steps toward the safety of the castle doors. Professor McGonagall had one hand pressed flat against her own chest and looked for one moment, about to faint on the spot.
"So that's what's actually been going on—"
Hermione said to Ron and Harry, her face was drained entirely of colour as the pieces clicked into place.
"Hagrid hasn't been secretly keeping a dragon in his hut this entire time, the way we all assumed. He's just been… entertaining a relative."
"Hello, Grawp—"
Bryan stepped forward smoothly from among the staff, walked directly and without any apparent hesitation right up to the enormous, resisting figure, and smiled at him with the same calm warmth he might have used to greet any new student.
"Welcome to the castle. Do come in as our guest—"
Harry watched the burly figure—still firmly held by the wrist in Hagrid's grip visibly flinch backward at the mere sight of Professor Watson approaching him.
"Gu—guessst…"
A long, effortful pause followed.
"…eat."
"Oh, look at him go, Professor Dumbledore, Professor Watson—"
Hagrid said, beaming with unmistakable pride despite the dark, spreading bruise visible around one of his eyes.
"He knows what 'guest' means now, see! I knew he could learn it, given time. Grawpy's been livin' up in them mountains all cut off from folks fer years now—he's just never had proper chance ter practice talkin' with people before, that's all it is!"
"Hermione—"
Ron murmured beside her, his own face had gone utterly white.
"Is it too late for me to quit that… that welfare society thing of yours? I'll pay you back ten times whatever you gave me for it, just please let me out right now."
"Hagrid never once mentioned any of this to me."
A vein was throbbing on Harry's forehead as he took in the full scene.
The hulking figure Hagrid called Grawp wasn't quite as physically overwhelming as Hagrid himself, size for size, standing side by side but Harry could sense, even from this distance, that his strength was probably not remotely inferior to Hagrid's own, judging by the furrows still visible in the lawn behind him.
"That's a giant?"
Neville looked genuinely a little stunned himself, staring at the figure.
"I always thought giants were supposed to be twenty feet tall or more, from what I'd read. But this one…"
Neville's eyes flicked sideways toward the two deep furrows still carved fresh into the green grass.
"…well. His strength certainly seems entirely up to standard, regardless of the height."
"That's not his true, full-grown form he's showing us right now—"
Hermione said, catching her own breath.
"Giants have an innate magical gift, rather like some rare wizarding talents such as being a Metamorphmagus. They're able to shrink themselves down considerably from their natural size, when the situation calls for it."
"Shrink themselves?"
Ron let out a few short horrified little laughs.
"What would they possibly want to do that for? Surely they realise, that something that size walking around at full height would scare people half to death on sight?"
"Because giants sometimes go looking for mates within the wizarding world too, Ron, in order to have children together—so when that happens, they have to make themselves a rather more… suitable size….."
Hermione, still watching Grawp with visible, lingering apprehension even as she explained, couldn't quite help letting her own deep-rooted instinct to "explain things thoroughly" take over regardless.
'Giants go looking for wizards. As mates.'
The corner of Harry's mouth twitched at the mental image that produced. He felt, somehow, standing there on the cold front steps in the gathering dark, as though the sky itself had just fallen in around him.
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