That night, thick snowflakes began drifting down silently from a winter sky that had been heavy with dark clouds all week. By Monday morning, the entirety of the Hogwarts grounds lay blanketed in a crisp layer of pure white snow.
Hagrid returned to his designated seat at the teachers' high table during the morning breakfast period. His presence didn't go unnoticed, because a half-giant of his genetic size made him completely impossible to miss inside a room.
But the collective applause that greeted his return was lukewarm at best. The green-clad Slytherin table remained utterly, tightly silent, a stark contrast to the thunderous cheers and table-banging coming from the Gryffindor side.
A few enthusiastic students, like Fred, George, and Lee Jordan, all sprinted up the aisle to his chair, roaring with delight as they reached out to wring Hagrid's enormous, calloused hands.
Others, like Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown, were noticeably less than thrilled by the return, exchanging gloomy, anxious looks over their goblets.
But Lucifer failed to notice Lavender's gaze, as the girl was busy giving him a weird fluttering look with her eyelashes, candying his appearance.
He could thoroughly understand their house hesitation. After all, Professor Grubbly-Plank's recent lessons were without the constant risk of serious physical injury, dismemberment, or a sudden, cold death.
He couldn't recall reading any historical record about an incident where a student had actually died during a 'Care of Magical Creatures' class, but that was beside the point.
Hagrid did undeniably host the more interesting, high stakes lessons in the school; he couldn't realistically say the curriculum wasn't engaging.
But Professor Grubbly-Plank didn't constantly spring dangerous surprises or more accurately, pure frights, on her students. A common, hidden Knarl was miles safer than a fire-spewing Blast-Ended Skrewt, and its properties were guaranteed to be on the core O.W.L. syllabus next June.
xxxxxx
The following day, during the early Tuesday afternoon, the fifth-year Gryffindors headed down the sloping lawns toward the 'Care of Magical Creatures' paddock with varying degrees of apprehension.
They were muffled against the freezing mountain cold in their thick cloaks, dragon-skin gloves, and winter scarves as they marched through the drifts. To the Gryffindors' immense satisfaction, Umbridge was nowhere to be seen as they trudged through the deep snow.
Lucifer and Ron Weasley had a much easier time navigating the snowdrifts than most of shorter students, purely due to the exceptional length of their long legs.
Hagrid was waiting patiently for the class right at the jagged edge of the Forbidden Forest. Up close, Lucifer saw that his facial bruises had altered color; instead of being purple, the skin was now tinged with an ugly green and yellow hue, and his lacerations were still bleeding a little bit onto his coat.
He was also carelessly carrying a bleeding half of a dead cow slung over his shoulder. Upon seeing the teenagers arrive, he greeted them with a booming voice, looking oddly pleased despite his injuries. "We'll be workin' in here teh day, children!" he said, jerking his chin back toward the dark canopy of forest. "Bit more sheltered from the wind! Anyway, they prefer the dark..."
"What prefers the dark?" Lucifer heard Draco Malfoy ask in a sharp whisper from right behind their desks. "What did the big oaf say, did you hear?" He figured the blonde boy was frantically asking Crabbe or Goyle for reassurance.
Lucifer vividly remembered the last time Draco had been forced to enter the forest back in their first year on this earth, and the arrogant pure blood had been terrified, crying little bitch back then too.
"Everyone ready?" Hagrid asked happily, his eyes scanning his class after they came to a halt in front of his boots. "Right, well, I've bin saving a special trip inter the forest secret tracks fer yer fifth year. Thought we'd go an' see these magnificent creatures directly in their natural habitat. Now, what yer studying today is pretty rare, kids. I reckon I'm probably the on'y person in all of Britain who's successfully managed ter train 'em—"
"And are you sure they're actually trained, are you?" Malfoy asked loudly, the mounting panic in his grey voice becoming even more pronounced as he stepped back. "Only it wouldn't be the first time you'd brought dangerous, wild stuff to our class, would it?"
The surrounding Slytherins immediately murmured in loud agreement with his complaint, and a couple of the more cautious Gryffindors did too. For vast majority of the class, the treeline of the Forbidden Forest seemed empty and dark, save for the occasional green Bowtruckle nestled quietly in the branches, creatures they had already studied terms ago.
"Of course they are trained, Malfoy," Lucifer's voice was cutting through the panic as he stepped inline. "They are the creatures that pull school carriages every single term after you disembark from the Hogwarts Express station. A wild, untamed creature wouldn't do that," he explained, having easily caught on to what specific herd Hagrid had planned to introduce for their lesson.
Everyone in the class, minus Harry, Hermione, and Neville turned their heads to look at Lucifer as if the boy had gone raving insane.
To his explanation, their professor gave Lucifer a thankful, relieved smile through his beard. "Alrigh' then! Everyone follow me close!" Hagrid barked, and he led the way straight into the dark trees.
Only Lucifer followed his steps without hesitation. Hermione immediately moved into the line when she saw her boyfriend walking forward, then Harry and Ron strolled over warily into the tracks, and the remainder of the class started to move in a tight huddle after that.
They walked into the thickets for about ten minutes until they reached a secluded clearing where the ancient trees stood so incredibly close together that it felt as dark as twilight around them, and there was no snow on the pine needles at all.
Hagrid unceremoniously dumped his bloody half of a cow onto the ground with a loud, wet 'thud' and stepped back to face his fifth-years. "Gather roun' the carcass, gather roun'," he said encouragingly, waving his massive arms.
Several of the teenagers were intensely jumpy, their eyes darting rapidly around the pitch-black shadows as though waiting to see what kind of monster was going to jump out at their throats.
"Now, they'll be naturally attracted by the smell o' the fresh meat," Hagrid explained, adjusting his coat. "But I'm goin' ter give 'em a loud call anyway, just to let 'em know it's me on the path."
He turned his body away, shaking his massive head to get his matted hair out of his swollen eyes, and let out an odd, sharp, shrieking cry that echoed piercingly through the dark trees like the call of a monstrous bird of prey. Absolutely nobody in the class laughed at the sound; most of them were far too terrified to make.
Only Lucifer remained naturally calm, his arms crossed, and Hermione was only composed because he was standing right beside her.
Hagrid gave the shrieking cry a second time into the dark.
A long minute passed in total silence, in which the class continued to peer nervously over their shoulders and around the roots, waiting desperately to catch the very first glimpse of whatever beast he was calling for.
He was just about to raise his chin to call a third time, but he abruptly stopped his breath when caught a silhouette walking out from the gloom. Lucifer looked toward the brush and a slow smile spread across his lips at the sight of the magnificent beast. He looked over at Harry, who let out a long, visible wave of relief across his face.
A pair of blank, white, glowing eyes were growing larger through the twilight gloom, and a moment later, the sharp, dragonish face, the sleek neck, and then the skeletal black body of a great, winged horse emerged silently from the darkness.
The magnificent creature glimpsed around the silent class for a few moments, swishing its long, black tail through the air, then bowed its skeletal head and began to tear raw flesh from the cow carcass with its sharp, pointed fangs.
Lucifer heard Ron whisper frantically to Harry, "Why doesn't Hagrid just call again? What is he staring at?"
The majority of the remaining class wore the same thoroughly confused, terrified expression that Ron had, and they were looking everywhere around the trees except at the winged horse standing a mere few feet away from their boots.
Only two other students in the entire class could actually physically see the animal besides Harry and Lucifer: a stringy Slytherin boy standing just behind Goyle, Theodore Nott, who was looking at the black horse with a deep look of aristocratic distaste, and Neville Longbottom, whose eyes were transfixed on the swishing motion of the tail.
"Oh, an' look here--here comes another one!" Hagrid said proudly, his voice booming as a second black stallion came up smoothly through the thick, dark trees, folded its leathery wings close to its ribcage, and dipped its head to gorge on meat too. "Now... put yer hands straight up into the air, who can see 'em?"
Harry happily put his right hand straight up into the sky. Hagrid gave him a firm nod of appreciation through his beard.
xxxxxx
"Yeah... yeah, knew yeh would, Harry," Hagrid said, his voice thick with emotion as he looked down at the boy. "An' you too, Neville, eh? An' 'course Lucifer can see 'em, an'—"
"Excuse me," Draco Malfoy interrupted in a loud, drawling sneer, stepping forward from the shadow of Gregory Goyle. "But what are we supposed to be seeing here?"
For an answer, Hagrid simply pointed his calloused hand toward the bleeding cow carcass resting on the damp pine needles. The class only had to stare for a few silent seconds before a few of them let out sharp gasps, and Parvati Patil ended up squealing in terror. It was simple enough to understand the horror of their perspective, watching chunks of flesh get torn cleanly off the bone by an invisible force, floating mid-air, and then disappearing down an unseen throat must have been deeply disturbing.
"What's doing it!?" She demanded in a terrified, high pitched voice as she ran blindly behind the nearest thick oak tree. "What is eating it!?"
"Thestrals," Lucifer answered, projecting across the clearing.
Beside him, Hermione smiled warmly. Thanks to her thorough reading, she already knew the creatures were based on the biological properties, he had subtly mentioned during their carriage ride the first time, but it was a relief all the same to know that's what they were gazing at.
"Ten points ter Gryffindor, Lucifer," Hagrid smiled through his matted beard, his chest swelling with pride. "Hogwarts has got a whole herd of 'em living in here. Now, who knows."
"But they're really, really unlucky!" Parvati shrieked from behind her tree, her fingers digging into the bark. "They're supposed to bring all sorts of horrible, bloody misfortune on anyone who sees them! Professor Trelawney once told me during a reading—"
"No, no, no," Hagrid chuckled warmly, waving a hand dismissively, "Tha's jus' silly superstition, that is, kids. They aren' unlucky at all, they're dead clever an' incredibly useful! 'Course, this school lot don' get a lot o' work, it's mainly jus' pullin' the castle carriages from the station, like Lucifer said earlier, unless Albus Dumbledore's takin' an international journey an' don' want ter Apparate—an' here's another couple of 'em coming out, look—"
Two more black, skeletal horses stepped quietly out from the dense undergrowth, their leathery wings folded tight against their ribs. One of them passed exceptionally close to Parvati's hiding spot. The girl violently shivered, pressing her spine flush against the rough bark as she whimpered, "I think I felt something... I think the beast is standing right near me!"
"Don' worry, girl, it won' hurt yeh a bit," Hagrid said patiently, tossing another chunk of meat to the ground. "Righ' then, now... who here can tell me why some o' yeh can see 'em, an' some of your classmates can't?"
Lucifer raised a hand with lazy grace, as did his girlfriend beside him, but Hagrid's eyes immediately called on the boy.
"The only people who possess the capacity to see Thestrals," he stated, his dark pupils tracking movements of the black herd, "Are the ones who have personally witnessed Death firsthand."
"Tha's right," Hagrid beamed at him, nodding his massive head. "Take another ten points ter Gryffindor! Now—"
"Hem, hem."
Lucifer closed his eyes, a slow, icy sigh escaping his lips. 'The parasite has arrived.'
Dolores Umbridge was indeed standing a few feet away from Harry's shoulder, wrapped tightly in the exact same hideous green hat and heavy matching wool cloak she had worn during Snape's post-clash inspection.
Her leather clipboard was already clutched firmly in her short fingers, her silver quill poised like a weapon.
Hagrid, however, was currently focused on tracking a younger Thestral near the carcass, thinking the animal looked a bit sick, so his ears had missed high-pitched, fake cough.
"Hem, hem."
He stood up straight to his full, towering height, blinking as his swollen eyes searched clearing for the source of the noise. "Oh, hello there, Professor!"
"I assume you received the official notice I sent directly to your cabin early this morning?" Umbridge asked. Her voice was exceptionally slow, patronizing, and incredibly loud.
Lucifer immediately picked up on the psycho tone behind her performance, his knuckles tightening inside his pockets. He focused entirely on controlling his breathing; otherwise, his rising magic would cause her body to expand and explode into a bunch of slimy, steaming piles of slop all over the pine needles and the students.
She was deliberately talking to Hagrid in that loud, simplistic manner because the man was a half-giant, and therefore, Umbridge's prejudice assumed him to be intellectually slow, uneducated, and stupid.
"The notice telling you that I would be personally inspecting your lesson today?" she pressed, her smile razor-sharp.
"Oh yeah," Hagrid said brightly, trying best to appear cooperative despite his battered face. "Glad yeh foun' the secret clearing alrigh', Dolores! Well, as yeh can clearly see—or, I dunno—can yeh? We're doin' thestrals terday—"
"I am terribly sorry?" Umbridge interrupted loudly, cupping a short hand ostentatiously over her ear. "What did you just grunt? I couldn't make out a word."
Hagrid looked a little confused, his brow furrowing as he looked down at her tiny body.
"I'm guessing you can't actually see them?" Lucifer asked her rhetorically, his cutting through her performance like a blade. "We are studying Thestrals today, is what Hagrid just stated."
He briefly regretted speaking at all, because Umbridge instantly utilized his defensive response to jot down a series of swift, spiteful notes onto her parchment, muttering aloud as her quill scratched: "Has... to... have.... students... speak... for... him... due... to... his... severe... dialect... barriers..."
'You short, pathetic, fucking toad...' Lucifer spat viciously inside his own mind, his pupils tracking the silver ink, stopping the urge to convert them into whips, and bleeding the woman.
"Well... anyway..." Hagrid turned back to face his fifth-years, looking slightly flustered and uneasy under the pressure radar, "Erm, what was I sayin'?"
"Appears... to... have... exceptionally... poor... short... term... memory... retention..." She muttered again, her voice ringing out through the trees. The only reason for being as loud and disruptive as she was in this outdoor class was because of her extreme, systemic prejudice against Hagrid's bloodline; she didn't care a bit if the man heard her insults.
A quick look across the aisle showed that Draco Malfoy's face was one of exuberance; he looked like Christmas had arrived a full month early.
"Oh yeah," Hagrid said, throwing an anxious, glance at Umbridge's clipboard, but he valiantly plowed forth into his notes. "Yeah, I was gonna tell yeh how come Hogwarts has got a whole herd of 'em in here. Yeah, so we started off years ago with one male an' five females. This specific one here," he stepped forward, patting the ribs of the very first skeletal horse that had emerged from the brush, "name o' Tenebrus. He's my special favorite, firs' one ever born here in the forest—"
"Are you aware," She said loudly, voice stopping through his explanation, "Ministry of Magic has classified thestrals as 'highly dangerous' beasts?"
Hagrid let out a soft, confused chuckle. "Thestrals aren' dangerous at all, Dolores! Alrigh', I'll admit they might take a quick bite outta yeh if yeh annoy 'em—"
"Shows... clear... signs... of... psychological... pleasure... at... the... baseline... idea... of... student... violence..." Umbridge muttered viciously, scribbling a massive mark onto her paper.
"No, come on now!" Hagrid was starting to look incredibly anxious as his hands shook. "I mean, a common dog'll bite yeh if yeh bait it, won' it? But thestrals jus' have an incredibly bad historical reputation because o' the death association, people used ter think they were bad omens, didn' they? They jus' didn' understand 'em, did they?"
Umbridge, however, did not offer him a word of a response. She finished writing her final, damning note with a sharp flourish of her quill, then looked straight up at Hagrid's towering face and said very loudly, enunciating every syllable slowly as if speaking to a toddler: "Please, continue teaching your class as usual. I am going to walk---" she mimed walking with two fingers across her clipboard, while Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson had silent, trembling fits of laughter behind their hands, "Among the students---" she motioned with a wave toward the rows of desks, "And ask them a few individual questions."
She pointed dramatically to her own open mouth to indicate the physical act of talking. Lucifer just stared down at her short frame with a stone-cold, predatory detachment. Beside him, however, Hermione began whispering angrily under her breath, hot tears of fury welling up in her eyes. "You hag... you evil, miserable hag!! I know what you're trying to do to him, you awful, twisted, vicious---"
Lucifer gently rested his hand over her trembling shoulder, his thumb rubbing through her cloak to ground her before she could breach, "Easy, pet," he murmured close to her ear. "Let the toad dig her hole."
"Erm... anyway," Hagrid said, clearly struggling to regain the lost flow of his lecture as he adjusted the half-cow, "So, thestrals, yeah. Well, there's loads o' good stuff about 'em---"
"Do you find," Umbridge asked in a loud, ringing voice, stepping straight up to Pansy Parkinson, "that you are actually able to understand Professor Hagrid when he talks to the class?"
Just like Hermione, Pansy had tears welling up in her eyes, but hers were entirely born of malicious laughter. Indeed, her spoken answer was almost incoherent as she tried to suppress her giggles in front of the Gryffindors. "No... because... well... it honestly sounds... like grunting a lot of the time..."
Lucifer stopped holding back his presence a little, a heavy pressure dropping over the clearing. "Then please, Pansy, allow me to unclog your ears so you can hear Hagrid clearly as every Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw in this forest can."
Umbridge spun around to face him, her smile turning frozen. "That will be ten points from Gryffindor for the disruption, Mr. Morningstar."
"Your petty reduction of Gryffindor's points matters little to me, Inquisitor," he shrugged his shoulders, crimson eyes onto hers with a detestable, clarity that made her breath stall.
Hagrid managed to get some of his operational momentum back, plowing forward to save the hour. "Yeah... loads o' good stuff about thestrals, kids. Once they're properly tamed, like this school lot, yeh'll never get lost in a storm again. 'Mazing sense o' direction they got inside their heads. Jus' tell 'em where yeh wan' ter go, an' they'll take yeh straight there!"
Umbridge, trying to regain control of the room, directed her next sharp question straight to Lucifer. "So, you can see the Thestrals, correct, Mr. Morningstar?"
"That's right," Lucifer answered, his voice dull of any emotions behind.
"Whom did you see die to earn that sight?" she asked, her voice dripping with an insincere pity as she poised her quill. She was however entirely unprepared for the reality of his answer.
"I lost count thousands of years ago, Dolores," Lucifer said in a clear, ice-cold voice that echoed hollowly against the dark trees.
A sudden, bone chilling shiver went straight down every human spine in the clearing, including Harry's, Ron's, and even Hermione's. The weight of the words carried a dark tone that no simple fifth-year student could ever mimic. Umbridge's face paled to a translucent, ghostly white, and she noticeably took a couple of rapid steps backward into the snowdrifts, unable to find her voice to speak again.
She spun around on her heel, clipboard trembling against her cloak as she faced Hagrid. "Well... I've gotten quite enough data for my report... you will receive your inspection results within ten days..."
Umbridge seemed to dare not speak another negative word against Hagrid's curriculum in front of Lucifer's presence, because at that moment, a terrifying feeling of fear had seized her heart, a fear she had never felt before in her entire life.
Lucifer watched in silence as her pink cloak vanished back down the snowy path, the feeling of murderous intent inside his mind never leaving.
As they were walking back up the sloping lawns toward the castle a half hour later, the Slytherin students had all rushed far ahead of Lucifer's pace, desperately wanting to get as far away from his shadow as humanly possible after what he had whispered in the woods.
"That was amazing, Lucifer, truly," Ron said, shaking his head after fighting off the residual feeling of fear that had gripped him minutes ago, "The look on her face.."
Lucifer, however, didn't say a word in response, his jaw set. After leaving the tree line of the 'Forbidden Forest,' he had glanced back briefly over his shoulder. Hagrid, undeterred by the High Inquisitor's files, was still rummaging through the dense undergrowth to check on his herd. The half-giant's efforts to appease her criteria, though determined, were ultimately destined to fail against the Ministry.
Shaking his head at the tragedy of it, he turned back around and continued silently toward the castle steps.
"Lucifer?" Hermione spoke his name softly, her fingers gently sliding through dragon-skin glove to squeeze his hand. She had calmed down from her previous, burning fury against Umbridge's racism.
Still, he said nothing to her, analyzing the next phase of the D.A. training. They walked together toward the warm glass greenhouses, ready for whatever tedious repotting tasks Professor Sprout had in store for their afternoon period.
He quite honestly wanted to forget the entire day, had ever happened.
xxxxxx
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