Hagrid, the Heir?
"Bullshit," they both said in unison.
Tyson, who was still sitting beside them with an empty plate in his hands, lifted his head when he heard his brothers.
"Bullshit?" he asked, confused.
"Yeah," Percy answered without the slightest doubt as he leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. "That guy's lying."
Harry slowly nodded as he looked seriously at the closed diary on the table again.
There was something about everything they'd just seen that simply didn't sit right with him.
"What guy?" Tyson asked curiously. After all, he hadn't seen the memories.
"The guy who lives in the book," Percy answered immediately. "He's obviously trying to trick us. After all, he's one of those handsome guys."
Harry turned his head toward him.
"What?"
"He's handsome," Percy repeated with complete seriousness, as if he'd just presented irrefutable evidence. "We already have a bad track record with handsome guys."
Harry stared at him for several seconds.
"I was going to say that everything seemed way too convenient," he said dryly at his brother's stupidity.
"That too," Percy added confidently.
Harry had a lot of things he could say about how his brother distrusted handsome guys or already considered them suspicious just for being handsome.
"Percy, I've already told you. Just because someone's handsome doesn't mean they're evil."
Percy raised an eyebrow confidently.
"Doesn't he kind of remind you of Luke?" he asked.
Harry opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again.
That was exactly what felt strange about this Tom Riddle guy.
"There's also Cedric Diggory," Percy continued.
Harry narrowed his eyes.
"Mark," Percy said.
"Mark isn't evil," Tyson immediately cut in.
"But sometimes he's an idiot," Percy replied simply. "Two out of three. Still a pretty bad statistic."
Harry could only let out a sigh at his brother's train of thought.
Tyson, who had been following the whole conversation, seemed to seriously think about it for a few seconds.
"Mark is very handsome," he added, as if accepting Percy's reasoning.
"See?" Percy said confidently.
"That doesn't prove anything. Tyson, don't encourage him or you'll end up just as stupid as he is," Harry added, already fed up with how completely off track the conversation had gotten.
Percy simply grabbed another sandwich from the table without a care.
"Like I was saying before you started with your nonsense... everything was way too convenient," Harry said, bringing them back to the main point.
Percy stopped joking and turned his attention toward the diary as well.
Harry placed a hand on the cover and started explaining what actually bothered him, leaving his brother's ridiculous theory about handsome people aside.
"We asked who opened the Chamber fifty years ago, and Riddle showed us the exact moment when he supposedly caught the culprit."
"But we never saw Hagrid open any Chamber."
"And we didn't see that Aragog thing attack anyone," Harry continued.
Percy began to understand where his brother was going with this.
"The problem is that Hagrid had some strange creature hidden away right when the attacks started," Harry added with a frown.
That made the half-giant more than suspicious and a possible culprit, so he couldn't say with one hundred percent certainty that Hagrid was innocent either.
"Hagrid is good," Tyson suddenly said.
Harry and Percy looked toward him.
Tyson seemed completely convinced of that.
"Yeah, we know," Harry answered after a few seconds. "Don't worry. Nobody thinks he's the bad guy."
Hearing that, Tyson smiled in satisfaction.
Harry and Percy, on the other hand, exchanged a brief look.
Just because Hagrid wasn't a bad person didn't mean he couldn't have done something incredibly stupid.
A brief silence fell between them.
Tyson looked at the diary with a little more suspicion.
Percy stared at the diary for several seconds. Then he narrowed his eyes.
"And he's still way too handsome."
Harry let out another sigh.
"Yes, Percy, he's... handsome," Harry admitted, finally giving up on that part. "Let's go back. We need to talk to Ron and Hermione. Maybe they'll think of something else."
"Sure. Let's take Tyson back to Hufflepuff first," Percy said simply, glancing at the big guy, who already seemed pretty full.
…
"Well, we all know Hagrid has a horrible obsession with giant and monstrous creatures. Remember the dragon in first year and that enormous dog," Ron said as the four of them gathered around the diary in the common room, after Harry finished explaining everything they'd seen. "He probably thought it was inhumane to keep a monster locked up for so long and wanted to let it out so it could stretch its legs... or paws or whatever," he added.
The image of a thirteen-year-old Hagrid trying to put a collar and leash on some ancient, deadly monster from a secret chamber seemed to appear in everyone's minds and, for some reason, it didn't seem surprising at all.
"I think Harry and Percy are right. It's way too convenient that this Tom Riddle somehow knew Hagrid opened the Chamber of Secrets. And how did he know Hagrid took that monster out of there instead of bringing it in from outside?" Hermione added in a more analytical tone. "Did you get a good look at the creature? Maybe we could figure out what it was," Hermione asked.
"No, we only saw a bunch of legs and a really fast shadow," Percy said, shaking his head.
"How many monsters do you think this castle can hold?" Ron asked, sounding bored. "We already know Hagrid was expelled, and when that happened, the attacks stopped. If that wasn't the case, they wouldn't have given that Tom guy the award."
Everyone fell silent for a few moments.
"Why don't we just go and ask him?" Hermione said, feeling that it would be the only way to finally clear up their doubts.
"Yeah, sure. Why don't we go over there and ask him, 'Hey, Hagrid, have you been letting some deadly, angry, hairy thing loose around the castle again?'" Percy said sarcastically.
Hermione shot him an annoyed look.
"We don't have to ask him like that."
"We could... ask him what he knows about what happened fifty years ago."
"And I'm sure he won't suspect a thing," Percy said. Then his expression lost some of its humor. "Besides... it isn't exactly nice being blamed for something you didn't do."
Harry looked at Percy for several seconds, and this time he didn't answer with a joke.
After all, his brother knew perfectly well what that felt like.
It hadn't been that long ago that Percy himself had been accused of stealing Zeus's Master Bolt and nearly starting a war between him and Poseidon. Only after finding the real thief had he managed to clear his name.
Maybe that was why Percy was so reluctant to point the finger at Hagrid without any real proof.
It was the same reason why, even though he suspected Cedric, he hadn't confronted him directly again and had limited himself to keeping an eye on him.
Hermione closed her mouth again.
After hearing Percy, they all reached more or less the same conclusion. There was no point confronting Hagrid when they still didn't really know what had happened fifty years ago.
Although keeping an eye on him for a while probably wouldn't hurt either.
Harry wanted to tell them about what he'd discovered with the key too, and maybe about the Marauder's Map. But seeing the mood after finding out that Hagrid had been blamed as the culprit fifty years ago, he decided to save it for later.
They already had enough problems for one night.