Hagrid winced as he overheard the chattering students. Somehow stories of his exploits from his student days had resurfaced. The current topic of the day was how he had been caught "raising werewolf cubs under his bed".

Funny how nobody stopped to even consider what "werewolf cubs" were considering the fact that Lycanthropy could only be spread by being bitten...

Their names had been Alex and Amy, and they were three when a German bomb released their previously responsible neighbor who had managed to hide his condition for more than a decade from a cage that should have been unbreakable and destroyed their lives, killing their parents in the process.

His father had been dying when the werewolf rescue group he belonged to had sent them along at great risk since the new wartime policy was to kill any and all werewolves that were found ostensibly because the ministry couldn't deal with both hunting down rogue werewolves and fighting a war at the same time.

His father couldn't care for them due to the illness that was rapidly taking his life, so it fell to him to take care of them.

Over the summer of 1941, he had become attached to the bright, cheerful children, finding that -since his half-giant heritage made him immune to werewolf bites, eliminating one potential problem - taking care of them wasn't much harder than taking care of any of the other numerous small animals that he had kept. Keeping them out of trouble was his main concern.

When it came time to return to Hogwarts, his father was gone and he couldn't find anyone else to take care of Alex and Amy as his contacts with the werewolf rescue were tapped out - mainly because some of the safehouse keepers had been arrested and the others feared being caught - so he decided to bring them to school with him. It was probably one of the stupidest mistakes he had made in his entire life. Had he known that he was entitled to take up to a year off for "bereavement" - thanks to an old rule that was created after a young wizard from an old and rather prestigious line suddenly found himself head of his family and therefore forced to put said family's affairs in order due to the sudden death of his father - he would have taken it in a heartbeat. As it was, he was only twelve, and he hadn't known about the rule.

A couple of his friends had helped him smuggle the young "orphans" into the school, and helped him hide them from the professors.

All went well until the first full moon of the school year came a few days later. His dorm-mates had thought hiding a pair of orphans to be a grand adventure and helped him care for them. One of the boys - whose older brother had revealed the location of the kitchens to him - would bring them treats between classes, another would tell them stories, and another had taught them how to play gobstones.

He had thought it cruel, putting them in the locked boxes that could then be hidden under his bed, but it was necessary. He didn't know where else to keep them, and if he didn't keep an eye on them, they might get loose and accidentally hurt someone.

The night of the full moon, one of his dorm-mates - a boy named Rodgers - had gone up to fetch something and seen Alex transforming as he put him in his box and ran to get a professor.

Not even Professor Dumbledore could help as he tried to point out that Alex and Amy were perfectly safe in their boxes, and didn't need to be turned over to the Ministry. Within an hour of their discovery, Alex and Amy were being carried away by a pair of unsympathetic ministry officials from the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures.

The last thing he saw before going to bed and crying himself to sleep was the stunned looks on his dorm-mates' faces when they finally processed exactly what "disposal" meant for the children they had spent the last several days caring for.