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Vast pumpkins the size of small cars were piled in the corners of the Great Hall, a colony of bats flitted between the floating candles, the wax of which was black tonight, but dripped blood red. The glittering stars on the enchanted ceiling were partially obscured by monumental cobwebs.
‘Ugh,’ shuddered Ron, looking up at them as they shuffled through the bottle neck into the Great Hall. ‘Please don’t tell me Aragog and his hideous children are invited.’
‘He’s ill,’ Hermione reminded him.
‘Thank God,’ said Ron darkly. ‘Well I hope the rest of them are gathered round his death web too.’
Harry was barely listening; he had just noticed Dean and Ginny ahead of them, partially obscured by some rowdy third year boys, but close enough that he could see Dean’s arm around Ginny’s shoulders, pulling her in for a playful, squeezing side hug.
She’s Ron’s sister, he reminded himself. Ron’s sister. Sister. Sister. Keep repeating it to yourself. Sister.
He imagined pulling her closer to himself, feeling their hips bump clumsily against one another, hearing her laugh up at him as he said something witty about the Halloween feast, looking forward to an evening with her beside him, maybe holding hands, maybe, at the end of the meal, she would rest her head on his shoulder, maybe afterwards they would kiss furiously against the stone wall-
‘Harry!’
‘Huh?’
Ron and Hermione were staring at him. Evidently they had been trying to get his attention.
‘We need to get good seats, apparently Dumbledore’s booked those dancing skeletons, and we don’t want to miss them again-’
‘Ah, yeah, they sound good,’ he said, remembering the sour jealousy the three of them had felt, several years prior, when they had missed the show to attend Nearly Headless Nick’s utterly dire deathday party.
‘Come on then,’ said Ron briskly. ‘Use your elbows, if necessary - oi! Out the way, please, Prefects coming through on very important Prefect business!’
‘Ron! You can’t use-’
‘Hermione, do you want front row seats or not? Dean and Seamus said last year they came down the middle a lot, so we probably want to be - oi! Shift it! Prefects here!’
Harry and Hermione hurried along the little slipstream Ron created through the crowd, until they found seats along the most crowded bench.
‘Excellent, you took our advice!’
Harry’s stomach plummeted; Seamus was leaning over to grin at them, but he had shamelessly placed two pumpkins from the table beside him, clearly saving seats…
Please don’t let one of those seats be for Ron’s sister, Harry thought desperately, as he sat down with Ron and Hermione. Ron’s sister, Ron’s sister - you know her, you’re good friends with her, you enjoyed a brotherly relationship with her this summer playing Quidditch, you join in laughing with her when one of her brothers does something stupid, you have absolutely no feelings that would be unexpected from someone with an extremely brotherly relationship, except for this brief, weird, ridiculous bout of wanting to snog her absolutely senseless, to want to feel her body pressed up against your own, to hear her sighing breathily in your ear…
Stop it, you absolute monster, he told himself. What the hell is wrong with you?
His worst fears came to life as Hermione joyfully called hello and waved, and Dean and Ginny fought through the crowd and joined them, shifting the pumpkins from the seats Seamus had saved for them. Harry wanted to wrench the pumpkin out of Dean’s hands and lob it directly in his face.
‘Happy Halloween,’ Ginny said cheerfully to him, and he forced a smile as he wished her a happy Halloween back.
It was maddening; what he had seen with Ron in the corridor the other night should not have affected him like this. He should not be so preoccupied with the memory of seeing them kissing in that deserted corridor. It was not as though he was unaware that Ginny and Dean would kiss, that was, after all, what happy couples usually did. Why then, had witnessing the act itself sent him into such an animalistic, bizarre rage?
Other students had now mostly taken their seats; a hush descended as Dumbledore rose, raising his blackened hand to quieten them.
‘A happy Halloween to you all,’ he said. He had donned robes of spectacular pumpkin orange for the occasion, looking as though he might be the Chudley Cannons oldest fan. ‘Tonight, the boundaries between the living and the dead blur, which seems a good an excuse as any for us to have a feast. Tuck in!’
They cheered, and on the tables, already laden with gothic candelabras and intricately carved jack-o’lanterns, food appeared. Harry helped himself to pumpkin risotto, and was surprised and pleased to see that along with the usual jugs of pumpkin juice, bottles of butterbeer had also appeared.
They ate and drank and Harry tried very hard to not think about Ginny sitting so close by. Thankfully, probably because Ron was there too, neither she nor Dean were being particularly coupley, but he still felt a prickle of annoyance as he heard her occasional snatches of laughter rising above the chatter of the crowd, and wished that it was he that was making her laugh.
Because he could make her laugh. And she could make him laugh. Sometimes they had to look away from each other to make sure they didn’t laugh - just catching her eye could send him into a fit of silent laughter.
But, of course, he told himself, Ron made him laugh a lot too. And Fred and George. And Percy had too, though not on purpose, and he had usually been laughing with Ginny those times… Either way, it was an entirely normal, brotherly, friendly, entirely platonic thing to do, laughing. It didn’t mean anything.
They had all helped themselves to vast quantities of food, and the noise of the Great Hall was rising even further, utterly giddy with the atmosphere.
‘Right,’ said Seamus, opening a butterbeer. ‘Spooky stories. Who’s got good ones?’
‘Spooky stories?’ said Dean.
‘Yeah. Who’s got a good Halloween story? Has anyone had a scary Hallow- fuck, sorry-’ Seamus looked at Harry, utterly horrified that he had put his foot in it. Ron snorted with laughter, and out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Ginny grin.
‘My spookiest Halloween story is when we went to a Deathday party,’ said Harry smoothly. ‘It was shit. Worst Halloween of my life.’
Ginny laughed, along with the others, but it was her laugh that sent a lurch of pleasure through his stomach, that made him inordinately pleased - smug, even - utterly thrilled that she found him funny.
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ said Hermione generously, ‘it was very interesting-’
‘All the food was rotting, Hermione,’ Ron reminded her. ‘We were starving.’
‘The band,’ Harry added. ‘The sound of it - how can you have forgotten? The screeching-’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Dean, holding up a hand, ‘start from the beginning - what is a Deathday?’
When the mains were finished, and Harry believed he could eat no more, the remains of their food vanished and were replaced by mountains of desserts and sweets, all of which were Halloween themed. Harry found that there was indeed room for the treacle tart decorated with pastry ghosts, and laughed along with the others as Seamus told rude limericks and Ron recounted a Halloween he had had as a child, where his father had charmed a ghostly white dress to swoop eerily outside the living room window.
‘We all screamed,’ he said fondly. ‘Ginny cried.’
‘No I didn’t!’ she said defensively.
‘No shame in it, Ginny, you were about five.’
‘I didn’t cry! You’re thinking of yourself - or Percy.’
‘And it was your dad who did that?’ said Hermione, amazed. ‘I just can’t imagine him…’
‘Oh, Dad has his mischievous side,’ said Ron.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Ginny, ‘Fred and George get it from somewhere. We’re talking about a man who enchants cars illegally, Hermione.’
The food was finished, but before they could rise and drag themselves up the many stairs to their beds, the candles dimmed. There was a murmur of excitement, and shushing that was louder than the whispers.
Drums started, and then trumpets, and a jazzy swing song was filling the hall; from the chamber off the side where Harry had once anxiously waited to be Sorted, skeletons appeared.
‘Are they real?’ he heard Hermione whisper.
‘Dunno,’ said Ron happily.
The dancing skeleton troupe were a little like puppets; Harry could see the wizards entirely in black charming them to dance behind, but within moments he felt as though he could no longer see them at all. They blurred into the background as the skeletons danced the lindy hop, their jaw bones unhinged in bizarre, comic smiles, their ribs and hip bones floating and flexing strangely, their slender bones making them seem oddly out of proportion. The overall effect was both disturbing and hilarious, and Harry laughed and applauded as he watched them move into a charleston, their knee caps swapping.
Ron had been right to push through the crowd; the skeletons came right down the middle of the hall, just feet from them, dancing enthusiastically to the swinging music. Harry had never seen anything like it, and it had been his best Halloween in a long time, perhaps ever - last year’s Halloween had been overshadowed by the presence of Umbridge at the staff table, the throbbing pain in his hand and in his scar, and his mind constantly leaping, quite out of nowhere, to dark memories.
This year, his mind instead preferred to trouble him with visions of Ginny in a variety of compromising positions.
What is wrong with you? he asked himself again, as he thought about clutching her as tightly as the two skeletons in front of him embraced. She’s Ron’s sister, she’s his sister, and she’s with someone anyway.
He risked a glance at her, and saw Dean lean in close, and whisper something in her ear. She grinned, and tilted her head towards him, and crinkled her nose mischievously as she replied. What it was she said, Harry didn’t know, but the expression on her face gave him a strange jolt as well as a stab of jealousy. He turned back to the skeletons.
He had changed his mind. Perhaps, all things considered, he preferred the Halloween with the troll.