Alright, numb nutz, this one was 12,000 words long, so that's like nearly 6 chapters rolled into one. LEAVE A REVIEW PLEASE. Also, I haven't called Harriet Gertrude yet, but it'll hit one day; if you understand, you understand; if you don't, don't worry about it.
Guys, I did an oopsie; I've been calling Volgograd Stalingrad cause thats what it was called historically in ww2, BUT I CHANGED IT WHERE THE ROMANOVS STAYED IN POWER. So I fixed that as well, so if y'all find Stalingrad again, let me know.
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Christmas night had come down over Hogwarts heavy and early, the way it always did in the deep of winter, and by half past seven the only light anyone in the Slytherin common room could see from the high windows was the faint green glow of the lake pressing against the glass, and above that, if you craned your neck and squinted, a thin grey smear where the snow had piled up over the surface of the water and buried the last of the day.
Theodore Nott had given up on cards. He'd lost four games in a row to Harper, which wasn't something he planned on admitting to anyone ever, and when Harper had started shuffling for a fifth with a smug little hum, Nott had told him he could go and play Exploding Snap with Warrington if he was that desperate to win at something, and had gone to sit by the fire instead. He was sprawled now in the big green armchair nearest the hearth, his legs hooked over one of the arms and his head propped against the other, a half-eaten sugar mouse from his Christmas stocking going sticky in one hand, and he was doing what he did best on holidays, which was absolutely nothing, as slowly as possible.
The room was quieter than it had been all afternoon. Whatever had gotten into Crabbe and Goyle had apparently passed. They'd turned up about an hour after their mad dash out the door, looking dazed and confused and complaining that they'd woken up in a broom cupboard on the ground floor with no memory of how they'd got there and a terrible taste in their mouths, and when Nott had asked them, very politely, whether their stomachaches had cleared up, they'd stared at him as though he'd started speaking Mermish. Then they'd gone to bed, both of them, at seven o'clock on Christmas Day, like a pair of exhausted toddlers. Nott had decided he didn't want to know. Over by the window, Warrington and the other fifth-year had gone back to their game, and every few minutes there'd be a sharp little bang and a curse. The sixth-year girl who'd been asleep under her book all afternoon had finally woken up, read three pages, and gone back to sleep again.
Pansy was on the sofa opposite him, the same one she'd been on all evening, her feet tucked under her and her chin resting on her hand. She'd changed her robes after the business with the spider web, and she'd made a great show of it, sweeping off to the girls' dormitories with her arm held stiffly out from her side as though it had been dipped in dragon dung, and coming back a quarter of an hour later in fresh ones, with her hair re-pinned and a look on her face that dared anyone to mention it. Nobody had. Nott had very nearly mentioned it, twice, and had both times decided that he liked his eyebrows where they were. Now she was flicking idly through a copy of Witch Weekly that someone's mother had sent, not reading it, just turning the glossy pages so the witches in the pictures waved and twirled at her.
Draca was at the writing table along the far wall, a little apart from them. She'd been there since the end of dinner, bent over a sheet of parchment with her quill scratching away, writing what Nott assumed was a thank-you letter to her parents for whatever expensive thing had come for her that morning, and every so often she'd stop, read back what she'd written, frown, and scratch something out. Her pale hair was still pinned up for the holiday. She hadn't said much since Crabbe and Goyle had bolted. Nott had a feeling that Lucian's little speech about Potter and irony was still rattling round in her head, and that she was still annoyed with Nott for bringing up the Heir business in front of everyone, and he'd decided, generously, to leave her be for the evening. It was Christmas, after all.
He'd just about decided to finish the sugar mouse when the door to the boys' staircase opened, and Lucian came up into the common room.
He'd showered. That much was obvious. The great matted tangle of grey spider silk was gone, and his long black hair was still damp and pushed back from his face, falling loose and dark past his collar, and he'd changed into the sort of clothes he usually wore when he wasn't being made to wear robes: dark jeans, heavy boots laced to the shin, a black shirt, and over it a long, dark wool coat that came down past his knees, buttoned up as though he meant to go somewhere cold. The fine chain of that odd pocket watch of his ran across his chest and disappeared into an inner pocket, the way it always did. And in his hand, held loosely against his side, he was carrying a letter.
Nott noticed the letter first. Then he noticed Lucian's face, and the sugar mouse stopped halfway to his mouth.
It wasn't that Lucian looked upset, exactly. Nott had never once seen him look upset, and he wasn't sure he'd know what it looked like if he did. Lucian Bloodthorne had walked into this house in September with half the room ready to curse him and the other half ready to kneel, and he'd looked at all of them with the same faint, lazy, amused expression he wore for everything, as though the whole castle were a rather good joke being told just for him. That look never really went away. It was there when he was mocking Lockhart, and there when he was baiting Draca, and there an hour ago when he'd stood in front of the fire covered in spider silk and wiped his hand down Pansy's sleeve. Nott had come to think of it as simply the shape of Lucian's face.
It wasn't there now.
Lucian came across the common room slowly, slower than he normally walked, and his eyes weren't on anyone. They weren't on the room at all. They seemed to be fixed on some point a long way past the stone walls, past the lake, past the castle, somewhere nobody else could see, and his mouth was set in a flat, quiet line, and there was something about the way he held himself, a sort of stillness through the shoulders, that made him look older than twelve. Older than anyone in the room. He didn't glance at the fire. He didn't glance at the fifth-years when their cards went off with a bang. He just walked, the letter held against his coat, his thumb moving back and forth along the edge of the envelope in a slow, absent way, as if he didn't know he was doing it.
Nott swung his legs off the arm of the chair and sat up.
On the sofa, Pansy had stopped turning pages. She was watching Lucian over the top of her magazine, and her eyebrows had drawn together slightly, and when Nott caught her eye she gave a tiny, questioning tilt of her head toward him, as if to say, are you seeing this? Nott gave her the smallest possible nod.
"He's got a letter," Pansy murmured, not quite under her breath. She sounded as though she'd just watched a hippogriff take up knitting.
"I can see that," Nott said, just as quietly.
"He doesn't write letters."
"I know."
"He's never written a letter. Not once. Not since September. I've never even seen him get one." Pansy lowered the magazine into her lap. "Everyone got letters after the Transfiguration thing, Theo. Your father sent you four pages. Blaise's mother practically sent him a contract. Half the house was writing home every night for a week. He didn't send a single one. He didn't even go up to the Owlery."
"I know," Nott said again, because he did know. He'd noticed it the way he'd noticed most things about Lucian, quietly and without saying anything, and he'd filed it away with all the rest: the ballpoint pen, the American accent, the way the ghosts bowed to him, the fact that he didn't go home for Christmas and didn't seem to have anywhere to go home to. Lucian didn't get post at breakfast. When the owls came swooping down into the Great Hall every morning in a great storm of feathers and parcels, Lucian just kept eating his toast. Nott had wondered about it more than once. He'd never quite had the nerve to ask.
Neither of them had been all that quiet, and the common room wasn't that big. Over at the writing table, Draca's quill had stopped moving. Nott saw her head come up. She looked at the two of them, and then followed their gaze across the room to Lucian, and to the letter, and Nott watched her face change as she put it all together. First surprise, then curiosity, and then, slowly, spreading over her pointed features like cream over a cat's whiskers, something that looked an awful lot like delight.
He knew that look. It was the look Draca got when she'd been handed something she could use. And after an evening of being needled and corrected and laughed at in front of the whole house, Nott supposed, she'd decided it was finally her turn.
She put down her quill. She rose from the writing table, smoothed down the front of her robes, tossed her hair back over her shoulder, and set off across the common room toward Lucian with her chin high and a little extra bounce in her step that Nott could only describe as prancing. She cut across the rug in front of the fire, swept straight past Nott's armchair without looking at him, and fell into step right beside Lucian just as he passed the end of Pansy's sofa, keeping pace with him easily, her hands clasped behind her back.
"Well, well," Draca said brightly. "What's this, then?"
Lucian didn't stop walking. He didn't look at her.
"A letter," Draca went on, as if he'd answered. She leaned in a little to peer at the envelope in his hand. It was thick and heavy and cream-coloured, Nott could see that much from his chair, and sealed on the back with a blot of dark red wax. "An actual letter. Written by you. To an actual person. I didn't know you did that. I thought you were above that sort of thing. Too busy with your trolls and your spiders and your little reports for Professor Snape." She smiled sweetly up at him. "So go on, then. Who's it for?"
Nothing. Lucian kept walking, unhurried, toward the stone wall where the door was. His thumb went on moving back and forth along the edge of the envelope.
Draca's smile flickered, just slightly, and then came back brighter. She skipped half a step ahead of him so she could see his face. "Is it a girl? It's a girl, isn't it? Some poor American witch pining away for you back home, wherever home is. Or is it someone important? You've gone all serious. You look like you're off to a funeral." She tilted her head at him, and her voice took on the teasing, sing-song lilt that Nott had heard her use on Potter a hundred times in the corridors. "Come on, Bloodthorne. You know everything about everyone in this castle. You're always poking your nose into everybody else's business. It's only fair. Who are you writing to?"
Lucian reached the wall. The stone door began to grind open in front of him, and the cold air of the dungeon corridor came sighing in round the edges, and for a moment Nott thought he wasn't going to answer at all.
Then he said, without turning his head, without slowing, in a voice that was perfectly level and perfectly quiet and completely empty of anything at all:
"Family."
That was all. He didn't smile. He didn't raise an eyebrow at her, or call her Malfoy in that drawling, amused way he had, or tell her she'd make a wonderful gossip columnist if the whole witch thing didn't work out. He didn't say anything clever. He didn't say anything else at all. He stepped through the gap in the wall and out into the dark corridor beyond, his long coat swinging round his boots, and the stone door slid shut behind him with a low, heavy grind, and he was gone.
Draca was left standing in front of the closed wall with her mouth slightly open.
For a long moment nobody in the common room said anything. Even the fifth-years had stopped their game. Nott realised he was still holding the sugar mouse, and that it had gone soft and tacky against his fingers, and he put it down on the arm of the chair without looking at it. He got slowly to his feet. Pansy had already risen from the sofa, the magazine forgotten on the cushion behind her, and she came round the end of it to stand beside him on the rug, and after a moment Draca turned away from the wall and walked back to join them, slowly this time, with no bounce in it at all. The three of them stood there in a loose little knot in front of the fire, all staring at the same patch of blank stone where Lucian had been.
"Well," said Pansy finally. "That was weird."
"That was very weird," Nott agreed.
"He didn't even say anything," Draca said. She sounded faintly indignant, and also, underneath it, faintly unsettled, as though she'd swung a fist at something and found nothing there to hit. "I practically handed it to him. I called him Bloodthorne. He always has something to say when I call him Bloodthorne. He didn't even look at me."
"He didn't look at anyone," said Nott.
"Family," Pansy repeated thoughtfully. She folded her arms and tapped one finger against her elbow, her eyes narrowed at the wall. "He said family. He's never said a word about his family. Not one word, in four months. I'd started to think he didn't have one. I'd started to think he'd been hatched out of an egg somewhere in America, honestly."
"Everyone's got family," said Nott.
"Not like his, they haven't." Pansy turned to them, and her voice dropped, and there was a sudden gleam in her eyes that Nott recognised with a sinking feeling. It was the same gleam she got when she'd heard a really good rumour about one of the Ravenclaw prefects. "Think about it. Who would someone like him write to? Somebody important, obviously. You don't write to your Aunt Mildred with a face like that. And you saw that wax. That was a proper seal." She paused for effect. "I bet it's the monarch."
Draca blinked at her. "The what?"
"The monarch. The king. Or the queen." Pansy's voice had gone hushed and a little breathless. "Whoever's actually on the throne, over there, wherever they are. The real one. I bet he's writing to the king or the queen, to tell them how he's getting on. That's what you'd do, isn't it? If you were a royal off at school somewhere? You'd have to report back. It'd be your duty." She pressed a hand flat against the front of her robes, and her gaze drifted off somewhere above the mantelpiece, and Nott watched her face go soft and dreamy in a way he'd never once seen it go for anything real. "Can you imagine? An actual queen. Not some stuffy old pureblood matriarch who likes to call herself one. A real queen, with a real crown, in a real palace. I bet she's beautiful. I bet she's terrifying. I bet she wears gowns that cost more than this whole castle." She sighed. "I'd give anything to meet her. Just once. To be presented at court. To curtsey in front of a throne and have everyone look at you. Can you imagine being a princess? Having people bow when you walk into a room? Having your own ballroom?"
"Pansy," said Nott.
"Having somebody write you letters with wax seals on them," Pansy went on, ignoring him completely. "Being driven about in some enormous carriage pulled by those winged horses, the big ones, with your crest on the door. Having a ball thrown for your birthday every year, with half the royals in Europe there—"
"Pansy."
"What?" She came back down to earth with a scowl. "What, Theo?"
Nott looked at her. He looked at Draca. Then he looked pointedly at the wall where Lucian had just walked out, and back at Pansy, and he said very slowly and very clearly, the way you'd explain something to a first-year, "You do realise he's royalty. Lucian. The boy who just walked out of here. He's royal. Dumbledore called him his Majesty in front of the whole school. You were there. The ghosts bowed. You stood up when he walked past, I saw you. You want to meet royalty? You've been sitting across the breakfast table from royalty since September. You had royalty wipe spider web all over your sleeve about two hours ago."
Draca made a small noise that might've been a laugh, swallowed it, and looked at the fire.
Pansy waved a hand at him, unimpressed. "Oh, please. That's not the same thing at all."
"It's exactly the same thing."
"It isn't. Don't be stupid." She tossed her hair. "Of course he's royal, technically. Everyone knows that. But he's obviously not anyone important. Not properly important. Not like the king or the queen. Use your head, Theo. If he were really anyone that mattered, do you honestly think they'd have sent him here? To Hogwarts? On his own? With no guards, no servants following him about, nothing? You don't send the crown prince off to a school with some monster loose in it." She ticked points off on her fingers. "He's probably some offshoot. Some cousin's cousin. Some branch of the family nobody talks about at dinner. I bet he's about a hundredth in line for the throne. He'd have to get through half the family tree before anyone handed him a crown." She sniffed. "And he barely acts royal at all, does he? He wears Muggle clothes. He writes with a Muggle pen. He spends half his time down at that great oaf's hut, mucking about with animals, and he came in tonight covered in spider guts. Royals don't come in covered in spider guts. A proper prince would have manners. He'd have dignity. He'd be charming." She paused. "Well. He'd be charming to me, anyway."
"He's charming to you all the time," Nott said innocently. "He gave you a lovely present this evening. Right down your sleeve."
"Shut up."
But Nott had seen his opening, and he was enjoying himself far too much to stop. He slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels and looked at her with an expression of enormous, wide-eyed sincerity. "No, but you're right, Pansy. You're right. He's probably nobody. Hundredth in line. Mucking about with trolls. Wouldn't know a ballroom from a broom cupboard." He nodded wisely. "Mind you, hundredth in line or not, he's still a Bloodthorne. He's still above every family in this room. Your lot included." He let that sit for a second. "So I suppose, if he ever decided he wanted your hand in marriage, he wouldn't even have to ask, would he? He wouldn't have to court you, or bring you flowers, or speak to your father, or anything like that. He'd just say so. He'd still have all the authority he needed." He beamed at her. "Lucky you. You could be a princess by Easter. A hundredth-in-line princess. Living in a hut. Covered in spider guts."
There was a short, dangerous silence.
Then two things happened at once.
The first was that Draca rounded on him. Nott hadn't expected that at all. He'd been watching Pansy, waiting for the explosion, and he'd half forgotten Draca was there, and then suddenly she'd turned from the fire and was glaring at him with her grey eyes gone hard and narrow and two spots of furious pink burning high on her pale cheeks, and her hands had balled into fists at her sides.
"That's a completely stupid thing to say," Draca snapped. Her voice had gone sharp and high and tight. "As if he'd ever. As if anyone would just—that's ridiculous. He wouldn't, anyway. Why would he? Why would anyone? And it's not funny, Nott, it's disgusting. You can't just go around saying things like that about people." She took a breath, and seemed to realise, all at once, that both of them were staring at her, and her face went pinker still. "It's just a stupid joke. That's all. It's stupid. You're stupid."
Nott opened his mouth to ask her what on earth had gotten into her.
He didn't get the chance, because the second thing that happened was Pansy.
She'd gone a deep, mottled red from the collar of her robes all the way to her hairline, and her mouth had fallen open, and for one long second she seemed to be too livid to actually speak. Then she drew back her arm and smacked Nott hard across the shoulder with the flat of her hand, and then again on the arm, and then, as he ducked and threw his hands up, a third time across the back of the head, hard enough to make his ears ring.
"You absolute—you horrible little—Theodore Nott, I swear on Merlin's grave—"
"Ow! Ow, Pansy, it was a joke—"
"I'll give you a joke!" She swung at him again, and he dodged behind the armchair, and she came round after him, red-faced and furious, swatting at him with her open hand while he backed away with his arms over his head. "Hundredth in line! Covered in spider guts! I'll cover you in spider guts! I'll stuff you down the plughole and see how you like it!"
Nott was laughing now. He couldn't help it. It came bubbling up out of him in great helpless gusts, and the more she hit him the harder he laughed, until he was bent half over behind the armchair with tears in his eyes and his hands over his ears, barely able to breathe, while Pansy rained blows down on his shoulders and Draca stood by the fire with her arms folded tight across her chest, still pink, still glaring at both of them, and looking as though she'd quite like to join in. Over by the window, Warrington had given up on his cards altogether and was watching with open interest. Harper was grinning from the corner.
"It wasn't even that funny!" Pansy shrieked.
"It was," Nott wheezed. "It was, Pansy, it was really funny—ow—your face—"
She hit him one last time, square on the top of the head, and then stood back, breathing hard, smoothing her robes down with both hands as though nothing at all had happened, and fixed him with a look of such cold and total contempt that he very nearly started laughing all over again.
"You," she said, "are a child."
"I'm twelve," Nott pointed out, rubbing his head.
"Exactly." She turned on her heel and stalked back to the sofa and picked up her magazine and sat down with it held up in front of her face like a shield, and turned a page so hard it nearly tore.
Nott straightened up, still grinning, still rubbing the back of his head, and glanced across at Draca. She'd turned back to the fire. She was staring into the flames with her jaw set and her arms still crossed, and the pink hadn't quite left her cheeks, and she wasn't looking at him. He thought about asking her, and then thought better of it. He didn't know what that had been, and he had a feeling that he wasn't going to find out tonight, and that if he pushed his luck any further he'd end up with a second set of handprints.
Instead he looked back at the wall, at the blank grey stone where the door had closed, and the grin slowly faded off his face.
Family, Lucian had said. Just that. Not a joke, not a dodge, not one of his clever little answers that told you nothing and made you feel stupid for asking. Just the one word, flat and quiet, as though it had cost him something to say it. Nott found that he couldn't stop turning it over. Who would someone like that even write to? A father? A mother? Some grandmother tucked away in a castle in a country nobody could find on a map? The king, like Pansy said, or the queen? Or someone else entirely, someone Nott couldn't even guess at? That old soldier, maybe, the one Nott's own father had gone on about for half a page in his letter, the one who'd fought Grindelwald at Stalingrad? And why did writing to any of them make Lucian look like that?
He didn't know. He didn't think anyone in the room knew. And he had a strange, uncomfortable feeling, standing there by the fire on Christmas night with the snow piling up somewhere far above the lake, that for the first time since September, he'd seen something Lucian Bloodthorne hadn't meant anyone to see.
---
The dungeon corridors were cold, and Lucian was glad of it.
He walked them without really seeing them, the long, low passages lit by green-flamed torches in iron brackets, the damp stone sweating faintly in the chill, his boots ringing softly on the flagstones and the sound coming back to him off the walls. He'd heard Malfoy's voice behind him the whole way across the common room, bright and needling and pleased with itself, and he'd known exactly what she wanted, and on any other night he'd have given it to her. He'd have stopped, and turned, and looked down at her with that slow smile she hated so much, and found something to say that would've turned her pink to the tips of her ears and kept Nott laughing for a week. It would've been easy. It was always easy with Malfoy. She practically wrote his lines for him.
He just hadn't had it in him tonight. That was all. He'd been holding the letter, and she'd been asking about it, and the only true answer had been the one he'd given, and anything clever on top of it would've felt like a lie.
He climbed the stairs out of the dungeons and came up into the entrance hall. It was almost empty. The great doors of the Great Hall stood half open on his right, and through them he could see that the house-elves had already cleared away the remains of the Christmas feast, though the twelve enormous trees were still standing along the walls, glittering with real icicles and hundreds of tiny floating candles, and the enchanted ceiling above them was a deep, churning grey, thick with falling snow that melted away into nothing before it reached the tables. A couple of the Weasley twins' fireworks were still drifting lazily about near the rafters, fizzing pink and green. Somewhere up the marble staircase he could hear Peeves singing a very rude version of a carol at the top of his lungs, and somebody, probably Filch, shouting at him to stop.
To his left, a passage led off toward the west side of the castle, toward the stairs that wound up and up to the Owlery at the top of the west tower. Lucian paused at the mouth of it for a moment and looked along it. He'd been up there once, in September, out of curiosity, and stood in that freezing round room open to the wind with hundreds of owls blinking down at him from their perches, every one of them watching him with round amber eyes, and he'd talked to a few of them. They were good birds, most of them. Clever and loyal and proud of their work. The big barn owl that belonged to the school had told him, quite seriously, that there was nowhere in the world it couldn't find if it was given a name and a direction.
Lucian hadn't had the heart to tell it that it was wrong.
There was a place it couldn't find. There was a place no owl had found in more than two hundred years, a place that had been wiped off every map and out of every memory and hidden behind magic older than this castle, and if you sent the school barn owl off toward it with a letter tied to its leg, it would fly in circles over every land from here to america until it forgot what it had been looking for, and come home a week later tired and confused and ashamed of itself. He'd seen it happen, once, when he was very small. An owl from some foreign royal house, sent with a birthday letter for his sister, that had never arrived. They'd found it months later, roosting in a barn in Texas, perfectly healthy and completely lost.
He turned away from the Owlery passage and crossed the entrance hall to the front doors instead, and put his shoulder against the right-hand one, and pushed it open, and stepped out into the snow.
The cold hit him like a slap, clean and sharp and wonderful after the stuffy warmth of the common room. It was full dark now, though it couldn't have been much past eight, and the snow was still coming down, not heavily, but steady and soft and silent, big fat flakes drifting down out of a low, starless sky and settling on his hair and his shoulders and the sleeves of his coat. The grounds lay white and smooth and untouched before him, all the way down to the black edge of the lake on one side and the darker black of the forest on the other, and the only marks in all that whiteness were a single wide trail of enormous bootprints, half filled in, leading from the castle doors down the slope toward a small, square shape at the edge of the trees, where warm orange light glowed in the windows and a thread of smoke curled up out of the chimney into the falling snow.
Lucian stood at the top of the steps for a moment and breathed. Then he went down them and followed the bootprints.
It was a long walk, and a quiet one. The snow muffled everything. He could hear his own boots crunching, and his own breath, and very faintly, far behind him, the sound of Peeves still singing somewhere inside the castle. He held the letter inside his coat, against his chest, to keep the snow off it. He didn't need to look at it to know what was in it. He'd spent most of the afternoon writing it, sitting cross-legged on his bed with the curtains drawn and his ballpoint pen in his hand, after he'd showered off the last of that wretched colony, and he'd thrown away three drafts before he'd been happy with the fourth. Two letters, really, folded into one envelope. One of them short and plain and dutiful. The other one long. The longest thing he'd ever written to anyone, about a castle and a lake and a half-giant and a girl who could talk to snakes, written to be read aloud in a quiet room very far away, by someone sitting beside a bed.
He didn't let himself think much past that. He'd learned a long time ago how far he could let himself think about that room before it started to hurt, and he kept his thoughts carefully on this side of the line, and kept walking.
Hagrid's hut came up out of the snow ahead of him, bigger and bigger the closer he got, its roof heaped thick and white, its windows glowing gold. Someone had hung a slightly lopsided wreath of holly on the door. The pumpkin patch had vanished under a smooth white quilt, except for one enormous orange shape in the middle that was clearly being saved for Halloween next year and was still poking stubbornly up through the drifts. Lucian stepped up to the door, stamped the snow off his boots on the step, and knocked.
From inside came a deep, booming bark, and then a scrabbling, and then Hagrid's voice, muffled and surprised. "Back, Fang. Back, yeh great lump. Who's that, at this hour, on Christmas?" Heavy footsteps crossed the floor. "If that's Peeves again, I swear on me mother's—"
The door swung open, and warm, golden light spilled out across the snow, and Hagrid filled the doorway.
He was wearing what Lucian could only assume was his best suit, a vast and hairy brown thing that looked as though it had been knitted out of several bears, and a tie with a pattern of small orange pumpkins on it that had been loosened halfway down his chest, and there was a paper hat from a Christmas cracker perched on top of his wild black hair, purple and slightly crushed. His beetle-black eyes went to the empty grounds first, at the height where an adult's face would be, and then dropped, and found Lucian standing on his doorstep with snow in his hair, and his whole great bearded face lit up with surprise.
"Lucian!" he said. "Well, I'll be. Didn' expect ter see yeh tonight, not after the evenin' we've had. Thought yeh'd be tucked up in front o' that fire o' yours with yer feet up, scrubbin' cobwebs out o' yer ears." He stepped back at once and swung the door wide, and the smell of woodsmoke and tea and something burnt-sweet came rolling out round him. Fang shoved his great slobbering head past Hagrid's knee and thumped his tail against the doorframe. "Come in, come in, don' stand out there freezin'. I've got the kettle on, an' there's rock cakes, an' a bit o' Christmas pudding left over if yeh fancy—"
"Thank you, Hagrid," Lucian said. "Truly. But I won't come in, if that's all right." He reached down and scratched Fang between the ears, and the boarhound groaned happily and leaned his whole weight against Lucian's leg. "I actually came to ask you something. I wanted to know if I could have your permission to let one of my friends out of the locket for a little while. Out here, I mean. On the grounds."
Hagrid's eyebrows climbed up toward the paper hat. Lucian saw his eyes go straight to the fine chain across his chest, where it disappeared into his coat, and saw the interest kindle in them, bright and immediate, the way it always did whenever the locket came up. Then, almost at once, a crease of worry appeared between his bushy brows, and he glanced back over his shoulder into the hut, and then out past Lucian at the dark, snowy grounds and the distant lights of the castle, and lowered his voice, though there was nobody within half a mile to hear them.
"Ah," he said. "Now, I dunno, Lucian. I'd love ter, yeh know I would. But I'm not sure that's allowed, not really. Not with the way things are up at the school right now, with the attacks an' all, an' everyone jumpy as a flobberworm in a frying pan. An' if it's that Wampus cat o' yours, or one o' them Nifflers yeh were tellin' me about, I don' reckon havin' one o' them runnin' loose about the grounds is the best idea just at the minute. Not on Christmas. Not with the teachers about. Professor McGonagall'd have me hide fer a rug."
Lucian found himself smiling at that, a little, despite everything. He chuckled quietly and shook his head.
"It's nothing like that," he said. "I promise. Jack stays in, and the Nifflers definitely stay in. Nobody's going to be running loose about anything." He drew his hand out from inside his coat, and the letter with it, and held it up between them so the light from the doorway fell across the thick cream envelope and the dark red wax. "It's to do with this."
Hagrid looked at the letter. Then he looked at Lucian. His big face creased in honest puzzlement. "A letter?" he said. "Well, that's no trouble at all. Why don' yeh just send it with an owl? There's a whole tower o' them up there, an' they'd be glad o' the work, it bein' Christmas an' all. Or yeh could borrow one o' the school's. I'm sure Professor Snape wouldn' mind."
Lucian chuckled again, softer this time. He looked down at the envelope in his hand, and turned it over once, and then looked back up.
"No owl can ever find its way to my home, Hagrid," he said quietly. "Not one. Not the school's, not anybody's. They've tried. It's not the owls' fault. It's just the way things are, where I'm from." He slid the letter back inside his coat. "So I have a special friend for that. He's the only one who can make the trip. That's who I'd like to let out."
Something changed in Hagrid's face as he listened. Lucian watched it happen. The puzzlement went out of it, and the worry with it, and in their place came a kind of slow, thoughtful understanding, and with it, Lucian thought, something else, something that looked a little like concern. Hagrid's eyes moved over him, over his face, and lingered there, and Lucian had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being looked at properly, the way Hagrid looked at an animal that was favouring one leg and pretending not to. He didn't know what Hagrid saw. He supposed he didn't look much like himself tonight. He hadn't felt much like himself all day.
But all Hagrid said was, "Ah. Righ'. Righ', I see." He nodded slowly, and rubbed his beard. "Well, that don' sound like much trouble, then, does it? A letter's a letter. Nobody could object ter a lad sendin' a letter home at Christmas." And then the concern in his eyes gave way, slowly and helplessly, to a growing, eager, barely contained gleam, and he leaned down toward Lucian with his hands on his knees, and his voice dropped to a delighted, conspiratorial rumble. "So go on, then. What is it? What's comin' out? Is it another o' them big cats? Is it somethin' with wings? It's got ter be somethin' with wings, if it's carryin' post. Go on. Tell us."
He looked like a child on Christmas morning. He looked, Lucian thought, exactly the way his own face must have looked when he was six years old and Drago had taken him to see his first dragon. And for the first time all day, something in Lucian's chest loosened a little, and he felt himself smile, really smile, at the sheer, uncomplicated joy of it. There weren't many people in the world who got excited about the things he loved the way Hagrid did. There weren't many people who'd ever got excited for him at all.
"It's a Thunderbird," he said.
Hagrid stared at him.
For a long moment he didn't move. He just stood there in the doorway, bent over with his hands on his knees and his paper hat askew, his mouth slowly falling open inside his great tangled beard, his eyes going wider and wider. Then he straightened up all at once, to his full enormous height, so fast that his head knocked against the top of the doorframe and sent a little shower of snow sliding off the roof, and he didn't even seem to notice.
"A Thunderbird," he breathed. "A real one? Out o' America? A real live Thunderbird?"
"A real live Thunderbird."
Hagrid threw back his head and laughed. It was a huge, booming, delighted roar of a laugh that rolled out across the snowy grounds and echoed back off the trees of the forest, and set Fang barking in excitement, and startled a pair of roosting birds out of the branches somewhere in the dark. He slapped his great hand against the doorframe, and the whole hut shook. "A Thunderbird! Merlin's beard! First a Nundu, an' now a Thunderbird! I never seen one, not once, not in all me life, only ever read about 'em. Yeh can't hardly get 'em ter come east o' the Mississippi, the books say. An' yeh've got one in yer pocket!" He shook his head, wiping at his eyes, still chuckling. "How many wonders have yeh got in that locket o' yours, Lucian? How much is in there?"
Lucian smiled up at him, and laid his hand flat over the place on his coat where the locket sat against his chest.
"More than I could show you in a year of evenings," he said. "It's a whole other world in there, Hagrid. Forests, and mountains, and rivers, and a sea. Things you've only ever read about, and things nobody's ever written about at all." He paused. "I'll take you there one day. Inside, I mean. I'd like you to see it. I think you'd love it."
Hagrid's laugh softened into something quieter. He looked down at Lucian for a long moment, and his beetle-black eyes were very bright, and Lucian didn't think it was only from laughing.
"I'd like that," he said gruffly. "I'd like that more'n anythin'." Then he cleared his throat loudly, and pulled the crushed paper hat off his head and stuffed it into one of his many pockets, and reached behind the door for an enormous moleskin overcoat that hung there on a peg. "Righ'. Well. If we're goin' ter do this, we'd best do it now, eh? Now or never, before some bugger turns up an' starts askin' questions. Yeh stay there, Fang. Yeh stay an' mind the pudding." He shrugged the overcoat on, and stepped out onto the step, and pulled the door shut behind him on the boarhound's mournful whine.
Lucian laughed. It surprised him a little, how easily it came. "You're right about that," he said. "If Professor McGonagall looks out of her window at the wrong moment, we're both going to be in an awful lot of trouble."
"Don' I know it," said Hagrid feelingly, and led the way down off the step into the snow.
---
They walked out together into the field that sloped away from the hut, toward the open ground between the forest and the lake, until the warm glow from Hagrid's windows was a good way behind them and there was nothing around them but smooth, untouched snow on every side and the dark wall of the trees off to their left. Hagrid's great boots sank deep with every step. Lucian's left a trail of smaller prints beside them. When they'd gone far enough that there was plenty of open sky above them and nothing taller than a fence post within a hundred yards, Lucian stopped, and Hagrid stopped beside him.
They stood there side by side for a moment in the falling snow. Then Lucian took the letter out of his coat and held it in his left hand. With his right, he drew the locket out on its chain, round and dark and worn smooth at the edges, cold from the night air, and pressed his thumb against the catch.
It popped open. There was no clock face inside. There never had been. There was only that round, depthless circle of darkness, darker than the night around them, like a hole cut neatly out of the world.
Beside him, Lucian heard Hagrid stop breathing.
Lucian lifted the locket a little, and put two fingers to his lips, and gave a short, sharp whistle, two notes, one high and one low.
For a heartbeat nothing happened. The snow went on falling. Somewhere far off across the lake an owl called once, and fell silent.
Then the air above the open locket began to hum.
It was a low sound at first, more felt than heard, a deep, building pressure that Lucian felt in his teeth and in the soles of his feet and in the fine hairs along his arms, which all stood up at once. The falling snowflakes nearest the locket began to drift sideways, as though caught in a breeze that wasn't there, and then to swirl, slowly at first and then faster, round and round in a widening spiral, and a smell came into the air, sharp and clean and metallic, the smell of a summer afternoon just before the sky breaks open. Lucian felt Hagrid take a half step back. And then, out of that small dark circle in the palm of his hand, something came pouring up into the night like water rising from a spring, and kept coming, and coming, and coming, and unfolded itself above them against the sky.
Wings came first. Not two of them, but six, three great pairs of them, one above the other, opening outward one after another with a sound like sails filling all at once in a gale, each one longer than Hagrid's hut was wide, longer than the hut was tall, until the span of them stretched so far across the field in both directions that their tips were lost in the falling snow. Then the body between them, vast and powerful and deep-chested, an eagle's body, a hawk's body, but bigger than any bird had any right to be, bigger than Lucian had ever seen any of his kind grow, with great hooked talons each as long as Lucian's arm, curled and gleaming beneath it. Then the head, proud and fierce and noble, crowned with a crest of long swept-back feathers that rose from its brow like horns, and a cruel, curved, golden beak, and two great eyes that burned the pale, electric gold of lightning seen through cloud. A tail streamed out behind it, long trailing ribbons of plumage that rippled and coiled in the wind like banners.
His feathers were the colour of a storm. Not the bright gold and white of the pictures in books, but darker, the deep slate-blue and bruised grey of a thunderhead rolling in over the plains at dusk, so dark against the night sky that for a moment Lucian could hardly tell where the bird ended and the clouds began.
And then the great bird threw back its head and cried out.
It was the most wondrous sound Lucian knew. It wasn't a shriek, or a screech, or anything like the call of any bird in this country. It was high and wild and ringing and impossibly clear, like a great bell struck in the middle of the sky, and it went on and on, and rolled out across the grounds and the lake and the forest and the castle, and as it did the sky answered it. The low clouds overhead began to turn. They moved slowly at first, and then faster, wheeling round in a vast slow spiral directly above the field with the great bird at its heart, and they thickened, and darkened, going from grey to slate to near black in the space of a few breaths. The gentle snowfall turned all at once into a howling, whirling blizzard. Wind came screaming down across the field, tearing at Lucian's coat and whipping his hair across his face, and somewhere up in the churning heart of the clouds, far overhead, there was a long, low, rolling growl of thunder.
The first lightning came a moment later. It forked down out of the spinning clouds in a jagged white-blue line and struck the great bird full across its back, and Lucian heard Hagrid make a sound like he'd been punched. But the bird didn't flinch. It didn't burn. Instead, it lit up. The lightning ran into its feathers and through them, and every single one of those storm-dark feathers blazed suddenly from within, as though a lantern had been lit inside each one, glowing a fierce, brilliant blue-white along every shaft and every vane, until the whole vast creature hung above them in the swirling snow like a living sculpture of lightning, outlined in light, every feather traced in fire. Then the glow faded, slowly, back into the deep storm-grey, rippling away along its wings and down its long trailing tail like ripples across dark water, until it was dark again.
Lucian let out a long, slow breath. He'd seen it a thousand times. It still took his breath away every time.
The great bird flapped its six wings once, hard, and a blast of wind and snow hit them both like a wall, and Hagrid staggered from sheer suprise. Lucian didn't. He stepped forward into it, one hand raised, palm out, and called up to the bird in a voice that was low and calm and steady, the way he'd speak to a frightened horse, though there was nothing frightened in the creature above him at all, only power, and joy, and a wild, crackling excitement at being out under an open sky again.
"Easy," Lucian said. "Easy, now. Easy. I know. I know, it's been too long. I know. Come down. Come on down. It's all right."
The wind dropped, just slightly. The great bird turned its head and looked down at him with one burning golden eye. And then it folded its uppermost wings, and then the middle pair, and spread its lowest pair wide, and came gliding down out of the whirling sky in a long, slow, graceful spiral, and landed in the snow in front of them with a soft, heavy thud that Lucian felt through the ground, and a great cloud of powdered snow went billowing up around it and drifted slowly back down.
It was even bigger on the ground. It towered over them. Hagrid, who towered over everyone, had to tilt his head right back to see its face.
The bird took one step forward, its enormous talons sinking deep into the snow. Then it lowered its great crested head, down and down, until its beak was level with Lucian's chest, and pushed the whole broad top of its head into him, hard, so hard that he rocked back on his heels and had to brace himself, the way Bruce did, the way an old dog does when its master has been away too long. A low, rumbling, contented sound came out of it, like distant thunder rolling a long way off.
Lucian laughed, properly this time, out loud, and put both his arms round the great feathered head as far as they'd go, which wasn't far, and buried his face in the soft feathers at the top of its crest for a moment. They were warm, and they smelled of rain and ozone and high, cold air. Then he drew back and began to rub, long firm strokes along the smooth feathers of the crown and down the great curve of the neck, and scratching with his fingers in the place just behind the crest where he knew it couldn't reach itself, and the bird pushed harder into his hands and half closed its golden eyes, and the rumble deepened.
"Hello," Lucian murmured. "Hello, you. I know. I missed you too. I'm sorry I've kept you cooped up in there so long. I've got a job for you tonight, a proper one. A long flight. You'll like it." He scratched behind the crest, and the bird leaned into it so far it almost knocked him over. "But first, there's someone I want you to meet."
He turned his head and looked back over his shoulder.
Hagrid was standing exactly where Lucian had left him, in the snow, his moleskin coat plastered with white, his beard and wild hair full of snowflakes, and he hadn't moved a single muscle since the bird had landed. His mouth was open. His eyes were enormous. He was holding both of his huge hands up in front of his chest, slightly cupped, as though he'd been about to catch something and had forgotten what.
Lucian smiled and motioned him forward with one hand.
"Come on," he said gently. "It's all right. Come here."
Hagrid came. He came slowly, one huge step at a time, his boots crunching in the snow, and Lucian could see that his hands were shaking. He stopped beside Lucian, close enough to touch, and looked up, and up, at the great storm-coloured head looming over them both, and the bird opened its golden eyes and looked back down at him with calm, curious interest.
"Hagrid," said Lucian, "meet Herbert. Or Herb, for short. He's the Prince of all Thunderbirds." He reached up and laid his hand flat against the side of Herb's great curved beak, and Herb leaned into it. "And he's one of my oldest friends in the world from home. We've known each other since I was smaller than one of his talons."
"Herbert," Hagrid whispered. His voice had gone hoarse. "Herb. The Prince." He swallowed. "Blimey. Hullo, Herb."
Herb tilted his head to one side, considering him, and blinked once, slowly.
"You can touch him," Lucian said. "He won't mind. He likes it, actually. Just go slow, and let him see your hand first."
Hagrid looked at him, and then up at Herb. Then, very slowly, very carefully, with the same exquisite gentleness Lucian had seen him use on newborn creatures in the forest, he raised one enormous hand and held it out, palm up, in front of Herb's beak, and waited. Herb looked at it. He lowered his head a little further and breathed on it, a long, warm, rushing breath that smelled of rain, and Hagrid's fingers twitched. Then Herb pushed his head forward, just slightly, toward the hand. And Hagrid laid his palm against the side of the great bird's neck and slid it slowly down across the storm-dark feathers, smoothing them, long and soft and gentle, from crest to shoulder.
Herb made a sound Lucian had only heard him make a handful of times in his life, a deep, soft, almost cooing rumble, and closed his eyes, and leaned his whole enormous weight sideways into Hagrid's hand, so hard that Hagrid had to plant his feet and push back to keep from being toppled over into the snow. A faint flicker of blue-white light rippled through the feathers under Hagrid's palm and faded away.
"Oh," said Hagrid. "Oh, would yeh look at that. Would yeh look at that, Lucian. He likes it. He likes me."
"He does," said Lucian, and found that he was grinning, a broad, unguarded, foolish grin, and he didn't care in the slightest. "He really does. He doesn't do that with everyone, you know. He's a prince. He's very particular about who gets to touch him. I've known people he's tried to kill for less." He watched as Hagrid stroked him again, and Herb pushed into it again, rumbling, and something warm and quiet settled into Lucian's chest and stayed there. "He's taken to you. I knew he would."
Hagrid stroked Herb's neck, and Herb leaned on Hagrid, and the two of them stood there in the swirling snow looking very pleased with each other, and Lucian let them have a minute. Then he stepped up close to Herb's head again, and put his hand against the side of his face, just below one great golden eye, and leaned in, and spoke to him quietly.
He spoke in the old tongue. The language of home, the language he'd learned at his sister's knee before he'd learned English, low and soft and flowing, with the rolling lilt of the Gaelic it was rooted in and something older running underneath it, something that made the words feel heavier than words should. It wasn't meant for Hagrid's ears, and he kept his voice to a murmur so that the wind took most of it away. He told Herb where to go, though Herb knew the way better than he did. He told him who to give the letter to, and who to give the second letter to. He told him to fly safe, and not to stop over any Muggle towns showing off, and to come straight back when it was done. And then, last of all, more quietly still, so that even Herb had to tilt his head to catch it, he told him to tell her that her brother was well, and that he was keeping his promise, and that he missed her.
Herb listened, very still. When Lucian had finished, the great bird pressed his head once more against Lucian's chest, briefly, gently. Then Lucian held up the letter, and Herb lowered his beak and took it, very delicately, between the tips of that great golden hook, as carefully as if it were made of eggshell.
"Thank you," Lucian said softly, in English. "Go on, then."
Herb lifted his head and backed away from them, one step, then two, then three, his great talons scoring deep furrows in the snow. Lucian put a hand on Hagrid's arm and drew him back as well, out from under the wings. Above them, the slow-turning clouds began to turn faster. The wind rose again, howling, whipping the snow round them in stinging white sheets. Thunder rolled across the sky, long and deep and close now, close enough that Lucian felt it in his chest. And Herb spread all six of his wings at once, wide, wider, filling the whole field, and crouched low, and threw himself upward into the storm.
The downdraft nearly flattened them. Lucian turned his face away from it and felt Hagrid's huge hand close on his shoulder to steady him. When he looked back up, Herb was already high above them, climbing, his great wings beating in slow, powerful strokes, and the storm went with him. Lightning came forking down out of the clouds, once, twice, three times, and struck him each time, and each time his whole body blazed with that brilliant blue-white fire from the inside out, so that for one instant he hung in the black sky above Hogwarts like a constellation made of lightning, every feather lit, wings spread wide, the letter clutched safe in his beak. Then the glow would fade, and he'd be dark again, a vast storm-coloured shadow against the storm-coloured clouds, climbing higher, and higher, and then the lightning would strike again and there he'd be, smaller each time, further away.
He wheeled once above the grounds in a great wide circle, as if taking a last look. Then he turned west, toward the distant mountains and the sea beyond them, toward the far side of the world and a place no map remembered, and the storm went rolling after him across the sky like an army following its king, thunder booming in his wake and lightning chasing at his heels. Lucian watched him go until the last flash of light was no more than a flicker on the horizon, like the glow of a far-off town. Then the thunder was only a low, distant grumble, and then not even that.
The clouds above the field began, slowly, to loosen and drift apart. The wind died away. The snow came gently down again, soft and steady and silent, the way it had been before, as though nothing had happened at all.
Lucian stood there in the quiet and smiled up at the empty sky.
Behind them, up on the hill, he could see that a good number of the castle's windows had lit up that hadn't been lit before, and that there were small dark shapes standing in several of them, pressed close against the glass, looking out at the sky. One of them, high up in what Lucian thought was probably Gryffindor Tower, had been flung right open, and someone was leaning out of it with a hand shading their eyes. As he watched, the shape gave up, and pulled its head back in, and the window closed.
"Reckon they'll be talkin' about the weather at breakfast," Hagrid said faintly.
"Let them," said Lucian. "It's Scotland. They'll put it down to Scotland."
Hagrid let out a long, shaky breath that steamed in the cold air. He was still staring at the place on the horizon where Herb had disappeared, and there was snow piled on his shoulders and in his beard and caught in his eyebrows, and he didn't seem to have noticed any of it. For a while he didn't say anything at all. Then he shook his great shaggy head slowly from side to side, like a dog coming up out of water.
"That," he said, in a hushed, wondering voice, "was the most amazin' thing I ever seen. In all me life, Lucian. An' I've seen a few things. I've hatched a dragon on me own kitchen table. I've raised Aragog from an egg no bigger'n a marble. But I never seen nothin' like that. Never." He turned and looked down at Lucian, and his voice went thick. "I don' rightly know how ter thank yeh fer showin' me. I'm—I'm truly glad I met yeh, Lucian. I am. I'm truly glad yeh came ter this school." He paused, and his big face worked for a moment, as though he were trying to get hold of something difficult. "An' I want ter say I'm sorry."
Lucian blinked up at him. Whatever he'd been expecting, it hadn't been that. "Sorry?" he said, confused. "What for?"
Hagrid looked away, out across the snowy field toward the black line of the forest, and rubbed the back of his neck with one huge hand, and when he spoke again his voice was low and gruff and ashamed.
"Fer the way I was with yeh, at the start," he said. "When yeh first came. I was up at the staff table at the Sortin', an' I saw that hat put yeh in Slytherin, an' I saw all them Slytherins standin' up fer yeh like yeh were somethin' special, an' I thought ter meself, well, there's another one. Another one o' them stuck-up little snobs what think they're better'n everyone else on account o' their name an' their blood an' their gold. Like the Malfoys. I thought it right away, before yeh'd said one word ter me. An' when yeh turned up at me door that first time, I thought yeh'd come ter look down yer nose at me hut, or ter make fun, or 'cause yeh wanted somethin'." He shook his head heavily. "I judged yeh. Straight off. Without knowin' the first thing about yeh. An' that weren't right o' me. Not right at all."
Lucian looked at him for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth tugged up into a small, crooked smirk, and he shrugged.
"Hagrid, it's all right," he said. "Honestly. I'd have thought the same thing, in your shoes. Half the people in that house are exactly what you thought I was. You weren't wrong about them. You just got the wrong one." He shrugged again, easy, careless. "And you let me in anyway, didn't you? You gave me tea. That's more than most people did."
But Hagrid was shaking his head, stubbornly, his great brows drawn down. "No," he said. "No, it ain't all right. Yeh deserved better'n that, Lucian. Yeh deserved better from me. I of all people should've known better'n ter judge someone by what's said about 'em, or where they come from, or what house some old hat puts 'em in. I've had enough o' that meself ter last me a lifetime." He put one enormous hand gently on Lucian's shoulder, and looked down at him with an earnestness that made it very difficult to look away. "I'm sorry. I mean it. I'm sorry."
Lucian didn't answer right away.
He looked away from Hagrid, up into the sky, toward the west where Herb had gone. The clouds had thinned enough now that here and there, between them, a few faint stars had come out, very small and very far away. He stood there for a long moment, looking up at them, with Hagrid's hand heavy and warm on his shoulder, and thought about what he wanted to say, and whether he wanted to say it at all. He didn't talk about home. He didn't talk about any of it, not to anyone, not here. It was easier that way. It was safer. But Hagrid had just stood beside him in the snow and put his hand on Herb's neck, and Herb had leaned into it, and Hagrid had stood there on his doorstep and said he was sorry for something Lucian hadn't even known he'd done, and meant it with his whole heart. And Lucian found, a little to his own surprise, that he wanted Hagrid to know. Not all of it. But some.
He let out a long, slow sigh that misted white in the cold air.
"The letter," he said quietly, still looking up at the sky, "was to my older sister. And to Drago Bloodvist."
Beside him, Hagrid went completely still. Lucian felt the hand on his shoulder go rigid. He glanced sideways and up, and saw that Hagrid had stopped dead, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide, staring down at Lucian as though he'd just announced that he was personally acquainted with Merlin.
"Drago Bloodvist," Hagrid repeated, in a strangled sort of whisper. "The Drago Bloodvist? Him what fought Grindelwald? At Tsaritsyn, in the war?"
"That's him," said Lucian. "He's very old now. Older than you'd think. He's looked after me since I was little. He's about the closest thing to a grandfather I've got." He paused. "Don't tell him I said that. He'd never let me hear the end of it."
Hagrid made a faint noise that might have been a promise. He didn't seem able to manage anything else.
"My sister, though," Lucian went on, and his voice went softer, and he looked back up at the sky. "I usually talk to her. About everything. Every day, more or less, since I was small. What I've been doing, where I've been, what I've seen. Anything that happens to me, I tell her about it. It's just what we do." He was quiet for a moment. "But I've been here since September, and I haven't been able to. Not once. I've never been away from her this long before. Not ever. Not even close." He swallowed. "So I wrote it all down for her instead. Everything. The castle. The lake. The forest. The trolls. The spiders." He glanced at Hagrid, and the ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "You. You're in it quite a lot, actually."
Hagrid's mouth opened and closed. His eyes had gone very bright.
"And Drago," Lucian said, "I wrote to him to say I'm sorry I won't be able to make it to the Christmas Ball back home this year. There's a big one, every year, at home. Everyone goes. He'll have been expecting me, right up until the music started, and I suppose I owe him a proper explanation for not turning up." He shrugged, and looked down at the snow, and scuffed at it with the toe of his boot. "I told him I wanted to stay at Hogwarts over Christmas, for a couple of reasons. But mostly because—" He stopped, and found it was harder to say out loud than it had been to write, and made himself say it anyway. "Mostly because I really enjoy spending time with you, Hagrid. Out here. In the forest. Going out with you to see the trolls and the Bowtruckles and the unicorns and even those wretched spiders. It's the best part of being here. It's the best part of this whole place, for me." He looked back up at him. "I didn't want to miss any of it. So I stayed."
For a moment, Hagrid just looked at him.
Then his great bearded face crumpled.
His chin wobbled. His beetle-black eyes filled up and overflowed, and enormous tears, each one the size of a Bertie Bott's bean, came rolling down his cheeks and vanished into his beard, and his shoulders began to shake, and a great, wet, heaving sob burst out of him that was almost as loud as his laugh had been.
"Oh, Lucian," he wailed. "Oh, yeh—yeh daft—yeh're too good ter me, yeh are. Yeh're too good ter me by half. Skippin' a royal ball fer me. Fer me! Fer a big old—an' me thinkin' yeh were a snob—"
And before Lucian could say a single word, or take a single step, or even get his arms up, Hagrid had reached down and seized him and hauled him into the most enormous hug he'd ever had in his life.
It was like being swallowed by a warm, damp, sobbing haystack that smelled of woodsmoke and dog and Christmas pudding. Lucian's feet left the ground entirely. His face was crushed into the front of the moleskin coat, somewhere around the third button, and Hagrid's arms closed round him like the jaws of a vice, squeezing tighter and tighter with every heaving sob, and his ribs creaked, and all the air in his lungs went out of him in a single strangled wheeze. He could hear Hagrid's great heart thundering away through the coat beneath his ear. He could feel tears dripping down onto the top of his head. He tried to say Hagrid's name, and nothing came out. He tried to pat Hagrid's arm, to let him know, and found that he couldn't move his own arms either. Little black spots began to dance at the edges of his vision. It occurred to him, distantly, that he'd survived Acromantulas and basilisks and a Nundu's breath and his own family, and that it would be a very silly way to go, in the end, hugged to death by a weeping half-giant in a snowy field on Christmas night.
And then, just in time, Hagrid let go.
Lucian dropped back into the snow, staggered, and bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping, dragging great whooping lungfuls of freezing air back into his chest. His ribs ached. His face was wet with someone else's tears. His hair was standing up on one side and flattened on the other. And as the black spots cleared and the breath came back into him, he found that he was laughing, helplessly, breathlessly, his shoulders shaking with it, harder than he'd laughed in months.
"Oh, blimey," Hagrid was saying, flapping his huge hands over him in a panic. "Oh, blimey, Lucian, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn' mean ter—are yeh all righ'? Did I break somethin'? Yeh've gone all purple—"
"I'm fine," Lucian gasped, still laughing. He straightened up slowly, one hand pressed to his side, and looked up at Hagrid's tear-streaked, horrified, beloved face, and laughed again. "I'm fine. I promise. I just—I think I might need a minute to remember how breathing works." He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. "Hagrid. I'm glad. I'm really glad. I'm glad you've enjoyed it as much as I have. All of it. The forest, and the trolls, and everything. I mean that." He took a deep breath, and it only hurt a little. "And there's so much more I want to show you. Everything I know about magical creatures, everything I've learned at home, all of it. The things in the locket. The things nobody here has ever even heard of. I'm going to try to show you all of it, soon. As much as I can. I promise."
Hagrid stared down at him for a moment longer, his eyes still swimming. Then he gave an enormous, wet, rattling sniff, and pulled a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth out of one of his coat pockets, and blew his nose on it with a noise like a foghorn that echoed all the way across the lake. When he lowered it again, he was smiling, a huge, wobbly, radiant smile that lit up his whole face beneath the tears.
"I'd like that," he said thickly. "I'd like that, Lucian. More'n anythin'."
And this time, when he put out his arm, he did it carefully, and gently, and simply laid it across Lucian's shoulders, warm and heavy and solid, and drew him in against his side. Lucian let him. He leaned into it, the way Herb had leaned into Hagrid's hand, and for once he didn't feel the need to say anything clever at all. The two of them stood there together in the middle of the snowy field, the half-giant and the boy, with the snow falling softly round them and settling on their hair and their shoulders, and the warm gold windows of the little hut glowing behind them, and the last faint grumble of thunder rolling away into the west, far away, toward home.