Hagrid's mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. His lips trembled, not with cold, but with the kind of trembling that said, "I have something to say, but I can't say it." Tears welled up in his eyes again. They did not flow; they surged, as if someone had dug a well behind his eyes and the water was overflowing from its rim, impossible to stop.
"N-no, that isn't how it was!!" Hagrid let out a nearly broken roar. The sound did not come from his throat. It came from his chest, forced out from the deepest part of that enormous half-giant body, carrying something that had been crushed down for fifty years and had finally cracked open, like the muffled rumble before a great earthquake. His hands seized his tangled hair, fingers digging into the roots hard enough for his knuckles to turn white, hard enough to redden his scalp.
His body shook, and the whole cell seemed to shake with him. Tin cans on the floor bounced against the boards, making soft, scattered sounds like raindrops striking a metal roof.
"Aragog! Aragog isn't a monster!" Hagrid's voice leaked through his fingers, muffled as though separated by a wall. "It just... it just..." He could not go on, because the words "it's only an Acromantula" had circled through his mind a hundred times, yet he could not say them. Once he did, Acromantula and monster would be equated. He had spent fifty years trying to keep those two words from being equated.
Harry's pupils contracted. The unfamiliar name Aragog fell into his ears like a stone thrown into deep water. It sank, but the ripples it stirred continued spreading outward, ring after ring, impossible to stop. He remembered that name. Malfoy had mentioned it. More than once. In the